Tamora Pierce Reread-Alanna: The First Adventure
So I have decided to reread Tamora Pierce’s Tortall series. I count these books as being part of the reason I grew up to be the feminist I am. And while I last reread the books in college and still know just how much I love them. It’s still probably been about ten years since I read them.
I know I’ll still love these books, so I have no intentions of these reviews being a these books used to be so great and now as an enlightened adult I hate them.
But I do want to kinda look at them both through that lenses of nostalgia and as the adult I currently am and see where my opinions have changed and where they’ve stayed the same.
So I’m gonna go through book by book and right my thoughts. Beginning, of course, at the very beginning.
Alanna: The First Adventure
So one thing I appreciate right off the bat is how the passage of time is dealt with in this book. We’re covering three years in a relatively short amount of pages, but nothing every feels too rushed. If a moment needs to be granted time to grow and breath it is, or if it can be something quick it is. The pacing works well for what it’s trying to achieve.
I love that Alanna, who could be such an overpowered character, is not always initially good at everything. This is not a choice I’d have realized was a good one as a kid, but as an older read it comes off as really smart. It’s good that we get to see her work to be good at things and succeed in the end, but she’s not initially perfect at it all.
George. I loved George as a kid. And I think I may love him more as an adult. I appreciate just how supportive he is in every regard. There’s never any question for him in supporting Alanna, both when he thinks she’s a scrappy boy and when he learns she’s a girl. I’m excited to watch my love for him re-develop over the next few books.
Jonathan. So this one I feel is one of the first areas where I’m really seeing a difference in how I perceive him, and I’m curious if that will change as I go along. I remember not liking Jonathan much throughout any of the books, and just finding him arrogant and obnoxious. But I feel like I can see him kinda as this young kid with a lot of responsibility on his shoulders whose finding his way as much as Alanna. And with the gods hands on him, just as much as her. So I’m interested so see where this goes within the rest of the books, especially with Jon and Alanna’s relationship, which I 100% used to hate.
There’s really only one moment in the novel that hasn’t necessarily aged well. And that’s when after Alanna has started her period, George’s mother has this speech about not changing what the god’s made you as. And while it works well for Alanna personally, since she is a cisgender woman only pretending to be a man so she can become a knight. The scene out of the context can read as a little insensitive or ignorant to the situation of trans people. And it’s in this where the book really shows it age and something I’m sure if written now the book would have handled much better.
Overall, this is still a great book and there’s not much in it that really as an adult I find truly lacking in it and that excites me going into the rest of the series.
