I began reading The Song of the Lioness quartet from Tamora Pierce’s Tortall series as bedtime reads after reading Lord of the Rings before bed in 2025. I’ve read them so many times before, so I know I can put them down and go to sleep whenever I feel drowsy. I have loved these books since I was in 7th grade – about 25 years – and I will always love them, but damn has it become clear how much I and the world have changed in that time. I will always love Alanna and her journey, but these were a bit rough to read after a few decades of growing up, and unlearning a lot of garbage I was handed as a kid.
Alanna: The First Adventure
The Quick & Dirty: Alanna is a young, noble girl who is supposed to be going off to the convent to learn to be a lady while her bookish twin brother goes to the capital to learn to be a knight. Neither wants to do the thing they’re supposed to do, so they switch places. Alanna pretends to be a boy and goes to learn to be a knight and Thom goes to the convent to learn to be a sorcerer. The first book in the quartet covers the years that Alanna is a page. During her page years, she makes friends with a few older boys – Prince Jonathan, Gary, Raoul, as well as George the King of Thieves. She is mostly learning how to be a boy and a page while keeping her identity concealed. There’s various adventures that seem wildly inappropriate for a 10-14 year old child – defeating a plague to save Jonathan, finding a magical sword in ruins with her teacher Sir Myles, and destroying a handful of pesky demons that have been menacing a city of millennia. A few friends find out her true identity, but mostly she keeps it under wraps.
The Wonderful:
- I love Alanna. She’s the quintessential redheaded firecracker. She’s quick to anger, and not afraid to speak her mind. It is extremely possible that I, also a redhead, identified way too much with her as a middle-schooler.
- Jonathan, Gary, Raoul, George, Myles, and Coram are a lovely, supportive friends and role-models.
- Moonlight is a palomino! What 13-year-old horse-girl wouldn’t cut off their right arm for a palomino?!
- Alanna’s stubborn dedication to working her ass off to achieve her goals. She doesn’t run from fights with her bully, she trains extra hard to be able to whoop his ass and send him away in disgrace. She isn’t a born swordswomen – she works at it, harder than any of her classmates, until she’s one of the best.
- The Mary-Sue of it all. While Alanna works for most of what she achieves, there are still a few Mary-Sue moments that are absolutely unbelievable, and I love it.
- Tamora Pierce doesn’t shy away from awkward things like periods. Forever one of my favorite scenes is when Alanna gets her first period, rushes to the city to reveal her identity to George so that she can ask him to take her to a healer without jeopardizing herself at the palace. He takes her to his mother who gives useful practical advice, supplies, and birth control. Amazing! 10/10! No notes.
The Cringeworthy: The pacing is a nightmare. Alanna’s extraordinary self-doubt that is rooted in her internalized misogyny is rough. The brief initial portrayals of the Bazhir are lightly problematic as is the laissez faire attitude towards this world’s version of colonialism.
In the Hand of the Goddess
The Quick & Dirty: Alanna is now a squire to Prince Jonathan. And she has a magical cat! She continues her training as a squire and is preparing to take her Ordeal of Knighthood, after which she plans to come out and share her true identity, then run away to have adventures. Those that already know, or suspect, that she is a girl try to persuade her to change her plans. The readers get confirmation that Duke Roger, the Prince’s cousin, is indeed A Bad Dude, but Alanna doesn’t get confirmation. However, she continues to suspect him for the duration of her squire-hood. She goes off to war/battle with Jonathan and her knight buds. We get a bit more Thom as he’s her main confidant about Roger. (Side Note: It’s a really, really good thing for Alanna that there’s a continent between her and her twin brother. If anyone in the capital knew what her brother looked like, they would be immediately suspicious of her. Based on his description, he sounds like burly, bearded, lumberjack of a man. Alanna is short, petite, and quite barefaced. It would just be hard to believe that they are twin brothers. ) TBH, there’s not much plot.
The Wonderful:
- Personal growth! Alanna is not just trying to be a better sword fighter, but she’s gotten some feedback on things she could work on from the Goddess, and she’s actually trying to grow as a person. Yay her!
- She’s trying to also be a lady! How fun that she is accepting that she’s a girl/woman, and trying to have fund with dresses.
The Cringeworthy: Honestly, this one is a bit rougher than the first. The pacing is still a nightmare. Then there’s the hormones! And the boys! Both George and Jonathan have developed emotional or sexual interest in Alanna and they get SUPER WEIRD, gross, possessive, and douchey about it. I’m going to assume this is a weird product of the time it was written. When Alanna accuses Roger of doing Bad Things and provides evidence, no one even attempts to go check his workshop for further proof. They just bypass any hint of reasonable fact checking and go straight for a sword fight to the death. Wut.
The Woman Who Rides Like a Man
The Quick & Dirty: Alanna has won her shield and then promptly run away from Corus. She and Coram, her lifelong manservant/dad guy, are off and having Adventures. They have made it as far as the Great Southern Desert before they’re ambushed by bandits and the tribesmen of the Bloody Hawk at the same time. Bandits are defeated, Alanna and Coram are taken back to the Bloody Hawk, where the tribesmen decide their fates. On the word of one of the men who recognizes Alanna from the demon killing in the first book, the pair is accepted into the tribe. The local shaman vehemently disagrees with this choice, and spends the rest of his not-very-long life attempting to wield more and more dangerous magic to murder Alanna and Coram. Once his plans backfire, Alanna is made shaman, takes responsibility for a few magical orphans (it’s never clear if they’re actually orphans or if the families that have abandoned them are still in the tribe), and undertakes training them to be her replacements. Within this subplot: one of the orphans dies from being too power hungry, Alanna accidently introduces the idea of schools to the Bazhir, and the two remaining apprentices take over as shamans by the end of the book. A Bazhir Elder, Ali Mukhtab, who was introduced in the first book makes another appearance. He is the Voice of the Tribes – a spiritual leader to the Bazhir – and has selected Prince Jonathan to be his successor. Prince Jonathan and Myles come to stay while Jon learns to be the Voice of the Tribes. Jon has gotten worse. He’s entitled, dismissive, rude, and just an all-around shitty dude to Alanna. Fortunately, this time she sees it. When he proposes (wtf) and assumes her acceptance (WTF), she turns him down properly, and he galumphs back to Corus spoiledly. She then runs off to Port Caynn to fall into George’s arms. The subplot where George has to start fighting for his crown is introduced. Then Alanna returns to the Bloody Hawk where the headman sends her on a mini quest which leads to the mega-quest in Book 4.
The Wonderful:
- More self-actualization! Alanna learns to appreciate and wield her magic. She recognizes when Jon is being shitty and dumps him.
- There’s more of a plot. (Maybe?) Instead of covering multiple years, the book seems to cover just one year. That’s an improvement in pacing at least.
- New characters that seem interesting. The apprentices are delightful, and when the tribe’s older women appear, they are lovely. It would have been fun to get more of them.
The Cringeworthy: Oof. There are several things that really move from “Cringeworthy” to “Problematic”. The Bazhir are supposedly modeled on the Bedouin. Look, I don’t know nearly enough about the Bedouin to comment on how the fictional version stacks up, but I do know the whole book reeks of colonialism. Basically: white lady brings feminism to backwards, veil-wearing women; white lady brings education to backwards tribes; white lady forces backwards tribes to be more modern; spiritual elder picks white man as his spiritual successor to lead the Bazhir because otherwise Tortall and the Bazhir will destroy each other – instead of Tortall just minding its own business. At best, it has big rich-kid-goes-on-a-gap-year vibes. At worse, it’s basically portraying and justifying American Exceptionalism in Southwest Asia and North Africa. Even if it was originally published 4 years before the first Gulf War, the US had already been meddling in the real region that this book portrays in fiction for quite some time.
That doesn’t even include the grooming subplot. In this book, Jon and Alanna split up, and she flees to George for comfort. That’s all fine and good, but George has been interested in Alanna since early in the second book. They first meet in the first book when George is 17 and Alanna is 10-11. Putting his initial romantic interest in her when she’s about 14-16, so he’s 21-23. When she takes a break from the Bazhir and officially launches a relationship with him, she would be 18-19 to his 25-26. If he – an adult – hadn’t been interested in her when she was 14 – A CHILD – this would maybe feel less dubious. But, as written, it’s just grooming. I wouldn’t have done the math about it as a kid reading this for this first time so I don’t remember it landing weird with me then, but I hate that I know it now. It would have been just fine for them to be closer in age or anything that would not have an adult man interested in a child.
Lioness Rampant
The Quick & Dirty: Alanna and Coram are undertaking the quest that they got the info for in the previous book. This has sent them to Maren in search of a historian/translator guy who can decipher the materials they picked in their earlier mini-quest. This leads them to the same inn where Liam Ironarm, the Shang Dragon is staying. Shang is a group of no-magical warriors recruited from commoner families that are raised to be effective fighters with and without weapons. Those with magical animals as their title (e.g. Dragon, Unicorn, Griffin) are the most proficient, dangerous fighters. Liam and Alanna are immediately drawn to each other – although they’re a bit of an oil and water type of couple. Alanna and Coram get their map and stuff translated and all roads point towards the Roof of the World on the other side of Sarain to find the Dominion Jewel, a powerful, magical gem. Alanna and Coram set off with Liam in tow. Soon over the border in Sarain they run into a gaggle of women and kids – including Thayet and Buri. Thayet is the daughter of the prevailing warlord although there is no love lost between her and her father. Buri is a K’miri woman – another indigenous tribe in the world – and Thayet’s protector. Sarain has been decimated by civil war and the landscape is grim and barren so they band together at least as far as the city of Rachia. In Rachia, the kids are all welcomed into a convent for safe keeping but Thayet and Buri are not so they join the quest for the Jewel. They make it up to the Roof of the World, it’s very cold, Alanna – against the advice of others – bundles up and hikes up the mountain in a blizzard to find the spirit of the mountain and fight him for the Jewel, she’s successful. She’s also got an intuition that it’s time to get back to Corus. So, they hoof it back to port Udayapur where they find Raoul, get a both, and go back to Corus. And, that’s just the first half!
Back in Corus, LOTS has happened, and everybody is getting ready for Jon’s coronation amidst general feelings of unease and intrigue. But, this review is getting long so you’ll have to read the rest of it yourself I guess.
The Wonderful:
- More women!!! I understand that it makes sense that there are so many men in these books, but it’s so refreshing to have more women. Thayet and Buri are wonderful, and it’s so good to have them on board.
- Alanna getting more confident. She’s grown from horrible self-doubt rooted in internalized misogyny to a confident young women who is working hard to unite the disparate aspects of her identity as a women, sorceress, and warrior.
- More story! Books two and three really felt like they lacked a lot of plot. Well, book 4 really stuffs a lot of plot into a tiny space.
The Cringeworthy: Ugh. The men. Liam is a weird, older paternalistic lover. Fortunately their romantic relationship is quite short. They make better friends than lovers. Coram, Liam, and Faithful often have the air of co-conspirators who just don’t quite trust or believe that Alanna is a knowledgeable, capable warrior. Sure she’s young, but she’s proven over and over that she’s deadly. Even Faithful (the cat) was a bit grating in this one. He always has a sarcastic or condescending remark. It’s a bit much, even for a cat.
Overall
The Song of the Lioness Quartet is extremely a product of its time. Pierce has mentioned in interviews that several things she wanted to write into these books – queer relationships for one – just couldn’t happen because publishers wouldn’t allow it at the time. She’s also mentioned what a boon the Harry Potter books were to the genre, because it proved that kids would read chunkier books. She was publishing these, and others, in a pre-HP world where she had to cut down the story by a lot. I think things like the colonialism, the grooming, the terrible pacing, the shallowness of worldbuilding are all, likely, products of being written and published in the 80s. At least, I want to believe that, especially to avoid being betrayed by yet another formative author. I really do believe – and I think this is well-proven by the advancements in YA in the last several decades – Pierce walked so YA could run. We absolutely would not have access to good fantasy stories about women without her. These books feel ultra-tropey because they help to form the canon that these YA and fantasy tropes emerge from.
I thought my reviews of these books were going to end up fluffier and more nostalgic than they did. I love Alanna. I love this series – regardless of it’s weird flaws. I remember the first time I read them being such a breath of fresh air. I got to read fantasy stories about a girl! And how hard she worked to get what she wanted, and how capable she was at stuff that supposedly only boys could do, and how respected she was by her male peers. That men who didn’t respect and treat women well were villains (Claw) or even better that villains would respect her because they knew she was dangerous and powerful (Roger). It was truly groundbreaking stuff at the time, and only got better reading the rest of the series.
I’m excited to keep reading Tortall. I’m glad that I’ve gone back and re-read these as an adult, especially as my friends’ kids are starting to get towards and age where I would recommend these books. I think I will still be recommending them, but at least now I have an updated understanding of what I’m recommending.
