#shatterglass

[marzartzz]

@isdantah

Heheheh it has arrived SG ratchet x Megatron

[bibliophilecats]

June 06 2025: National Eyewear Day

[tragedyposting]

As I often do when I’ve been in a reading slump, I’ve returned to the world of Circle of Magic lately. After rereading Shatterglass, I had to take a fresh crack at drawing Tris, my favorite weather witch!

[franticvampirereads]

2025 reread: As much as I love the Circle Of Magic & The Circle Opens, this was not my favorite book in the series. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Shatterglass just fine and Tris is one of my favorite characters. But I feel like this story, while it did Tris justice, it wasn’t the best it could have been.

There were parts that I absolutely loved! Like when Tris went full teacher mode and didn’t take any sass from her student that was twice her age. Or when she was taking care of a small child who had just lost the only family she’d ever known. She was gruff but kind and I loved getting to see her come into her own with her magic and teaching style. That was really special.

On the other hand, there were parts of this book that left me frustrated to no end. It felt like parts of this book were long and drawn out for no reason. Like the training and teaching scenes, while great in their own ways, were longer than in any of the other books in this series. I also felt like the lead up and the suspense of the murders wasn’t quite as climactic as it could have been. Also, Keth (Tris’s student), seemed to go from being somewhat disabled (speech impairment, chronic pain & fatigue, etc. that came from the lightning strike that awakened his magic) to perfectly fine with almost no mentions of it after the first few chapters. Which was a little disappointing, if I’m being completely honest.

Overall, I liked this one and I think it’s a good ending for the Circle Opens series. I loved getting to read about Tris again, it was kind of like coming home after a long trip. Anyway. Shatterglass is getting four out of five stars.

[discountalien-pancake]

“You have a lot of faith in a man who took you out of a salt mine because he thought you were someone else,” Celaena said, as if she couldn’t help herself.

“Better than someone who knew who I was and left me there,” Lillian retorted.

—

It took a long time to come up with the concept for this cover, and the length of the title really didn’t help. Had something of an epiphany a few days ago and then slammed this out in three days.

[checkoutmybookshelf]

The Circle Opens Quartet

There is something deep and rich about the Circle Universe that the Circle of Magic quartet illuminated but kind of didn't have space to fully explicate. That's why I am fully and forever grateful that Tamora Pierce followed up Sandry, Briar, Daja, and Tris on their adventures with their teachers after they're granted their mage credentials. Let's talk the Circle Opens quartet.

While the Circle of Magic books focus on the four protagonists as a quartet in each book (even if the plot might center on a single protagonist), the Circle Opens books see our protagonists hundreds of miles apart and truly having to stand on their own feet and grow their own strengths. They also all get their own students in these books, and seeing how their personalities, teachers, and backgrounds affect how they interact with their students makes these books very, very fun. It also makes these books feel more like true YA than advanced middle grade (which is kind of how the Circle of Magic books read, but that's not a criticism; those books are amazing).

Magic Steps finds Sandry in Emelan caring for Duke Vedris after a stroke and basically low-key running the country while her uncle recovers. On a morning ride, she stumbles across Pasco Acalon as he dances a luck spell for a friend's family of fisherfolk. After some...creative convincing...Pasco agrees that yes, he has magic and needs training. This is where Sandry learns about the condition of her new credentials: If she discovers a new mage, and a teacher with a complementary power set cannot be found, the discovering mage is ethically and legally bound to teach the new mage at least the basics.

As though teaching a reluctant 12-year-old with family baggage and a formerly unknown type of magic wasn't enough, Sandry also has to deal with a blood feud that followed a merchant family to Emelan and has turned ugly. An unmagic mage is helping two assassins commit murder, and in the process is contaminating the city with unmagic.

Unmagic is a super cool concept, because it is the absence of everything and it consumes everything it touches, especially magic. It is horrifying in that it simply is; it's not evil in and of itself but it consumes with no care or compassion, and so in practice, it tends to look evil in an implacable, inevitable sort of way. There was a sense of existential horror to the magic itself that is unusual in Tamora Pierce's work, but was highly effective when pitted against Sandry's radical hope and optimism.

Ultimately, Sandry and Pasco work together to get Pasco's magic under control and bring peace back to the streets of Emelan.

Street Magic finds Briar and Rosethorn in the great, ancient city of Chammur, working with the local Living Circle Temple and beginning Briar's side hustle as a shakkan shaper and merchant. Chammur also brings Briar's past slamming into his present, since the city has a strong gang presence--so strong that they are practically their own political and social force.

This becomes more complicated when Briar discovers that Evvy--a street rat who makes a few coins by polishing stones for souk merchants--is, in fact, a stone mage. When Chammur's official stone mage is revealed to be the world's biggest douchecanoe and Evvy--quite rightly--refuses to have anything to do with him, Briar takes her under his tutelage.

Honestly, the best parts of this book are Briar's relationships with Evvy and Rosethorn. Evvy pokes all kinds of holes in Briar's past worldview and how he sees gangs' function in society. She's also delightful on her own merits, whip smart, and a devoted cat mom.

Briar and Rosethorn's relationship is delightlfully complicated and simultaneously dead simple. After her death in Briar's Book, Rosethorn is a bit physically delicate, and Briar has quietly taken on the role of surrogate son and caretaker, even as Rosethorn is his surrogate mother and teacher. The two of them have complimentary rough edges, and as Rosethorn herself says, they've come so far beyond who owes what to who, and simply are each other's. I love these two.

Cold Fire locates Daja and Frostpine in Namorn in the dead of winter, as Frostpine continues on his quest to expose Daja to as many smiths and craftspeople as possible, broadening her already deep education. While visiting an old friend and his family, Daja discovers that their twin children are mages. Now unlike Sandry and Briar, Daja is able to find mage teachers for her young students, but neither teacher has the time or space to do the basics--so that falls to Daja to teach.

In addition to her very energetic students, Daja is wrapped up in the Kugisko community, including local firefighter Bennat Ladradun. Daja expands her already prodigious skillset to include walking through burning buildings to rescue those trapped inside. She unfortunately has to do this rather a lot, because Kugisko has a firebug.

Ultimately, Daja's story in Namorn is about compassion, patience, and learning to see things as they are, not as she might wish them to be.

Shatterglass shows us Tris and Niko at a magical conference in Tharios, right in the middle of the reign of a Jack the Ripper-esque criminal who is attacking and murdering Yaskedasi--female street dancers. In the midst of academia and murder, Tris finds herself two students: Keth Warder, a journeyman glassblower recovering from a lightning strike, and Glaki, the orphaned daughter of a murdered Yaskedasi Keth was friends with.

Poor Tris never plays life on easy mode. While she isn't the only one of the four mages to take two students, she is the only one with students with such diverse needs. Keth is a grown-ass adult who had training and a career before a lightning strike awakened his ambient magic, whereas Glaki is like four years old and an academic mage. And yet, somehow Tris manages. She looks after both her students and helps the police catch their murderer.

Overall, this quartet is a phenomenal follow up to the Circle of Magic quartet, and I love how the world expands beyond Emelan here. I also love that the tables turn and our students become first-time teachers themselves. If you are any sort of Tamora Pierce fan, I cannot recommend the Circle Universe enough.

[monthgirl]

[readingcircletemple]

Editing Thoughts:

As we reach the end of the Circle of Magic series, magic starts to get weird, y'all. I know a lot of people struggle with things that happen that are not previously established, but I never had an issue with them. Yes, this is my series. I grew up with these books, so CoM is kind of my baseline for magic anyway. But I'm going to pitch one more possible explanation fror why I think it works:

I ran across this video by Timothy Hickson a while back, in which he explains how soft magic systems work really well to emphasize the emotional beats of a story. (This, incidentally, helped me understand why I like soft magic systems so much.) This works particularly well in CoM because we see in the first couple of books how emotional states can have an influence on magic--namely, when Tris is angry, she sparks. And she must learn to control her anger.

So at the end of Shatterglass, when Tris basically opens a hole in the ground? This is again, an echo of her anger. And at the end of the Will of the Empress, Tris's ability to be with the other three "physically" while still being so far away is the CoM version of the family member leaving and saying, "I'll always be with you in here (points to heart)."

The thread circle is a symbol of the childhood bond these four form. Then they part from one another, grow, change, and return. For many of us, childhood friendships fall apart as we grow older. We leave friends and that's that. And throughout the book, they struggle with whether or not their frienship has ended--if it was just a childhood thing. And in a way it was, and in a way, it wasn't. By the end of the story, they reform their friendship anew--it is no longer a childhood bond, but an adult one, which comes with all the complexities of adulthood. So the thread circle--the symbol of their childhood friendship--disappears as they form a newer, deeper, stronger bond. And the circle goes deeper--literally moving into their hands--and leaving them with a scar, just as friendships can both open and heal wounds. And yes, it's something new and unexpected, that can't easily be explained. But isn't that so much of what life (and friendship) is?

But I would be wrong. Let us know what you think in the comments.