SarahJanet's Books

Terrier

A Tortall Legend: Beka Cooper, by Tamora Pierce.

In 2001, when I was working at a library just outside the city for the summer, one of the library assistants there turned me on to Tamora Pierce. I absolutely devoured all of her Tortall books in about two weeks, and then reread them all. She was midway through the Protector of the Small series at the time, and I'm pretty sure Squire had just come out because I remember having to wait for it. (Which sucked, because the Protector of the Small series is the best one by a factor of about a million. Kel is totally her coolest character.) (I just looked it up on Amazon: May 22, 2001. Wow, I can hardly ever do that! I know when HP6 came out because it's my freaking wedding anniversary, but other than that I have no idea when I read things, usually.)

Anyway, I had spent much of my first few weeks at this job arguing that I didn't really like fantasy, much to the chagrin of this (awesome) library assistant who loved it. I liked Harry Potter, obviously (I started reading Harry Potter in 1999, shortly after book 3 came out. Mum had the first two and lent them to me, and I made her go to the store and buy me book three when I was about 60 pages from the end of book two. I was 18, so it's not like I couldn't have gone myself, but I didn't want to have to stop reading! It is a tribute to my mother's appreciation for book binging that she went out immediately and bought it. Mind you, she wanted to read it herself, but I still don't know how many mothers would go to the bookstore upon the demand of her 18 year old daughter.), but other than that I was sort of lukewarm on a lot of fantasy. I'd gone on a brief binge of the classics (Madeleine L'Engle and Susan Cooper, and I loved Over Sea Under Stone), but was still kind of pretending like I hated fantasy.

Vicki talked me into trying Tamora Pierce, and grudgingly, I picked up Alanna.

And oh my god, I freaking loved it. I read those books faster than I think I've ever read anything in my life. I kept a booklog that summer (just titles and the dates I finished them in my daytimer), and flipping through it, I read First Test, Page, and Squire in three days. I read more than 50 books in four months that summer. It was also the summer I started writing again, and the summer Jamie and I started dating, and the summer of the best job ever. Clearly, that was a good summer.

ANYway. Suffice it to say that since that very busy summer, I have been a big time fan of Tamora Pierce's Tortall books. Oddly, I've never even picked up any of her other books, because I've heard too many people say they aren't as good and I don't want to ruin the magic.

Terrier is a "Tortall Legend," which means it's a story set hundreds of years before Alanna's time. It's the story of Beka Cooper, a way-back ancestor of George Cooper, Alanna's husband. She is a "puppy," in training to be a "dog" - a member of the city watch. Unlike Pierce's other Tortall books, this is written in diary format from Beka's point of view.

I don't think the diary worked as well as it could have, and this is far from my favourite of the Tortall books. I enjoyed it, and I liked Beka, but I felt like she was trying to hard to make Beka a proto-Alanna rather than giving her a personality of her own. That's the problem with prequels, I find - when you're trying to postshadow foreshadowing, it's a little anvil-y. (I'm looking at you, George Lucas.) There were so many moments of "this is just like George if he'd been on the side of the law instead of the Rogue!" that it got a little annoying. Plus, I like all the nobility detail in the other books, and this lacked the inner workings of the palace that I like so much. Plus with it being a prequel you can't have the random throwaway appearances by other characters from other series, and I love that. Raoul is pretty minor in Alanna, but he is the greatest character ever in the Protector of the Small series, and I like that.

So. If you are a big Tortall fan, you'll like this book. But if you've never read any Tortall books, don't start with this one. Go pick up Alanna, or the Protector of the Small series. (Alanna is chronologically first but Kel is the coolest.)

posted by SarahJanet @ 11:13 PM