The Philippine Online Chronicles

I wasn’t much of a fantasy reader when I was young. My love affair with reading started with one of the Sweet Valley Kids books. Early on, I never strayed from the Sweet Valley, Nancy Drew and Babysitters Club shelves during bookstore visits, ignoring all the other books and genres in the process. When I grew up, I was more likely to pick up “fluffy” books than fantasy or scifi. I can answer a question about high school cliques in a heartbeat, but anything about magic or supernatural creatures or lands that only exist in the imagination, and my brain shuts down. It wasn’t until last year, when I set a personal goal to read more fantasy books, that I wandered over to other shelves. However, given the great variety of fantasy titles, it’s easy for a fantasy newbie like me to be overwhelmed.

Enter Tamora Pierce and The Song of the Lioness series. Spoiler Warning from here on out.

Published from 1983 to 1988, The Song of the Lioness was originally written as a single book for adults, but was rejected by the publisher. Pierce cut up the manuscript and revised it into four books for teenagers. These four books feature Alanna of Trebond, and chronicle her journey into knighthood and her adventures as a knight. In Alanna: The First Adventure, we meet Alanna and her twin brother Thom, who switches places with her to go to the City of the Gods so Alanna could fulfill her dream to be a lady knight. She disguises herself as a boy, names herself Alan, and starts her knight training at the royal court.  Alanna makes friends along the way like Crown Prince Jonathan, King of Thieves George Cooper, and her teacher, Sir Myles of Olau, as well as enemies like Ralon of Malven and the man who becomes Alanna’s nemesis, Duke Roger of Conte. In the next book, In the Hands of the Goddess, Alanna continues her training, now as Jonathan’s squire and good friend, and adopts a strange purple-eyed cat she named Faithful. She joins her first war and tries to find proof that Roger is responsible for the mess that the kingdom finds itself in. Alanna becomes known as The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, which is also the title of the third book, where she leaves Tortall after revealing her identity, killing Roger and becoming a knight. She finds herself joining a Bahzir tribe where she becomes a shaman, and learns how to use and be less afraid of her power. The quartet ends with Lioness Rampant, where Alanna searches for the legendary Dominion Jewel, and returns home to help her friends to fight a war and protect both the soon-to-be-crowned King Jonathan and all of Tortall.

All four books are set in Tortall and the surrounding lands, which is one of the most well-imagined places that I have ever read about. There is richness in Tamora Pierce’s description that allows you to see the setting, just enough to bring Tortall and the other lands to life, but the prose never gets so detailed that readers get lost, a problem I’ve had with other books in the fantasy genre. (This is why I prefer reading Urban Fantasy, because it’s usually set in a world similar to our own.) In Pierce’s hands, the world is a character and not just a setting, so it shouldn’t be surprising that her characters too feel very much alive from the very first page. All the characters have unique personalities, from Alanna and her friends, to Roger and his accomplices, even down to Alanna’s cat Faithful. Each character has a specific voice and good dialogue that’s easy to understand and occasionally quite funny: for example, Alanna’s banter with Jonathan (discussing some crowning ceremony matters) reminded me of how I talk to my guy best friend – complete with her utterance of “I guess I’m too old to put a frog in his bed.” It’s not something I expected for a knight to say to a king-to-be, and yet it felt natural given how their relationship had grown by then. This is why people who became fans of this quartet of books during their childhood remain fans until they grow old. You know the feeling when characters become like friends you’ve known for a long time? That is the feeling that these characters evoke.

However, readers looking for a dense, complicated plot may not enjoy these books as much as I did, since the plot is straightforward. Being a book written for teenagers, the books don’t delve too deeply into gray area and moral dilemmas, and the conflicts are usually more black and white. We know who the bad guy is from the moment Alanna looks at him, and we know that it’s not yet the end for him when she first gets rid of him. We also know that whatever happens, Alanna and her friends will prevail. They will get hurt, yes, but they will definitely prevail. Of course watching them prevail is part of the fun: there is much to admire in their fight scenes, and I think Pierce did a great job with making them seem real--or maybe like a really good game: all the swordfight, magic and combat reminded me of Heroes of Might and Magic, except without the mythical creatures, the named spells, and the artifacts.

Much of the strength of the series lies in Alanna’s journey both as a woman and a knight. Nobly born girls were expected to train to become proper ladies, but Alanna resisted that stereotype. Instead, she goes against the flow to prove that a girl can be just as good a knight as a boy. Alanna grew from the little girl pretending to be a boy at the start of the first book, to a brave, strong, loyal and sometimes stubborn woman, who stands by her principles and does everything to protect her loved ones, even at the cost of her own life. But Pierce didn’t just show her as a kick-ass knight--she also showed Alanna’s soft side: despite the fact that she possessed many stereotypically masculine traits, Alanna also experienced the need to feel pretty, the need for companionship, and a desire for romance with the men in her life. While I don’t really agree with the way Alanna handled her loneliness (by jumping into relationships with the people around her), her journey of self-discovery is something that I, and probably a lot of other girls, can relate to. In a way, The Song of the Lioness is an “I am  woman, hear me roar” story, so it’s not surprising that most of the fans of the series are female, and why the books have such a big impact on girls.

Case in point: a few months ago, I was at a bookstore when I overheard two girls talking about how annoyed they were that today’s female protagonists always had to have love as their main goal. I eavesdropped on their conversation with much amusement, until one of them said: “Oh, but Alanna, she’s always been my hero.” I didn’t know who Alanna was back then, so I couldn’t relate. Now that I’ve read the whole series, however, I understand why, and I can say that “The Woman Who Rides Like A Man” has also joined the ranks of my female literary heroes.

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