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Spidrens and Stormwings and sass, oh my!
Feb. 12th, 2013 06:00 pmOver the course of Nemo (hi Nemo! You found us! *ducks tomatoes*), I reread the second of Tamora Pierce's Tortall quartets, The Immortals. The Immortals consists of Wild Magic, Wolf-Speaker, Emperor Mage, and The Realms of the Gods.
The Immortals was the first Tamora Pierce series I read (or at least, the first three volumes are) and I have weirdly vivid memories of being ten years old, at dinner with my family at Empire Szechuan, and just being totally unable to put Wild Magic down for more than about five seconds.
The Immortals follows teenage Daine Sarrasri as she builds a new life for herself after her family is killed by bandits. "Building a new life for herself", in this case, involves leaving rural Galla to take a job with the horsemistress of the Queen's Riders of Tortall, moving to Tortall, discovering that her "knack" for animals is actually "wild magic," and embarking on a course of studies and series of adventures that allow her to become a ridiculously powerful wildmage who can talk to animals and heal them and shape-shift into them and all sorts of crazy stuff. Disney princess powers this ain't. Meanwhile, mages from Carthak have breached the barrier between the Mortal and Divine realms, allowing all sorts of immortal creatures into the human realms that haven't been seen in four hundred years. Daine has to help her shiny new Tortallan friends defeat (a) Carthak and (b) HORDES OF BIG SCARY MAGICAL CREATURES THAT AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BE THERE AAAAAHHHHHHHH.
The Immortals tends to be either people's most favorite or least favorite Tortall quartet, usually depending on how obsessed with animals (particularly horses) they are. I am not particularly obsessed with animals, and I'm pretty unfamiliar with horses, but I still think The Immortals is a joy to read. It's basically the... happiest Tortall series? It deals a little bit less with dealing with small-minded bigots than the other serieses and a little bit more with ridiculously high-powered magic and gods and fighting big scary monsters. The series takes place during the reign of Jonathan and Thayet, and it's clear that Tortall has gone through a lot of Enlightenment-style changes since the end of the Song of the Lioness series. Since Daine pretty immediately falls in with the Queen's Riders (Thayet's pet project, a mixed-gender guerilla-group-style branch of the military) and other awesome people like the monarchs and Alanna and the adorkable-but-super-powerful mage Numair Salmalín, we mostly see just the progressive cool people who are running the show--the inevitable backlash isn't really portrayed until the Protector of the Small series. This isn't to say that The Immortals doesn't deal with serious stuff--it has a lot of well-done, thought-provoking material about family and identity and the responsibilities that come with power and the relationship between humans and the environment and a whole host of other awesome things--but Daine really spends much less time fighting patriarchy and much more time fighting magical goddamn fucking scary things, like spidrens (big huge spiders with human heads who eat people) and Stormwings (half-human, half-metal-bird creatures that desecrate the dead and make nasty comments to everybody) and arrogant emperor-mages. Daine often fights with a bow, because she's an awesome archer (there are backstory reasons for this), but mostly she fights with the help of her sassy animal friends. And I'm not kidding about the sassy. Her pony Cloud is like, The World's Sassiest Pony, and the baby dragon she adopts can't even talk but is sassy anyway, and we meet all sorts of creatures like the male badger god, her divine guardian, who is super grumpy and hilarious; Quickmuch, the sass-tastic marmot who basically moons the world's most powerful mage (and cusses him out using language she "must have learned from squirrels"); Flicker, the squirrel who tells Daine she makes a crappy squirrel; Zek, the pygmy marmoset who figures out how to use keys; sassy bats; sassy cats... the world's most charmingly clever wolf-pack... Tamora Pierce basically writes the best animals and they are all in this series. (Faithful even makes a silent, but STILL SASSY, appearance in Book 4.) If you like books where the secondary characters are awesome (which I do), you will probably adore the everloving shit out of The Immortals, because there are just so many awesome side characters, human, animal, and immortal. The only issue with this series is that you might die, because if the scary things (which are very, very scary) don't scare you to death, the cuteness will.
Also: There are zombie dinosaurs. How could you not like a book series with zombie dinosaurs?
The Immortals was the first Tamora Pierce series I read (or at least, the first three volumes are) and I have weirdly vivid memories of being ten years old, at dinner with my family at Empire Szechuan, and just being totally unable to put Wild Magic down for more than about five seconds.
The Immortals follows teenage Daine Sarrasri as she builds a new life for herself after her family is killed by bandits. "Building a new life for herself", in this case, involves leaving rural Galla to take a job with the horsemistress of the Queen's Riders of Tortall, moving to Tortall, discovering that her "knack" for animals is actually "wild magic," and embarking on a course of studies and series of adventures that allow her to become a ridiculously powerful wildmage who can talk to animals and heal them and shape-shift into them and all sorts of crazy stuff. Disney princess powers this ain't. Meanwhile, mages from Carthak have breached the barrier between the Mortal and Divine realms, allowing all sorts of immortal creatures into the human realms that haven't been seen in four hundred years. Daine has to help her shiny new Tortallan friends defeat (a) Carthak and (b) HORDES OF BIG SCARY MAGICAL CREATURES THAT AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BE THERE AAAAAHHHHHHHH.
The Immortals tends to be either people's most favorite or least favorite Tortall quartet, usually depending on how obsessed with animals (particularly horses) they are. I am not particularly obsessed with animals, and I'm pretty unfamiliar with horses, but I still think The Immortals is a joy to read. It's basically the... happiest Tortall series? It deals a little bit less with dealing with small-minded bigots than the other serieses and a little bit more with ridiculously high-powered magic and gods and fighting big scary monsters. The series takes place during the reign of Jonathan and Thayet, and it's clear that Tortall has gone through a lot of Enlightenment-style changes since the end of the Song of the Lioness series. Since Daine pretty immediately falls in with the Queen's Riders (Thayet's pet project, a mixed-gender guerilla-group-style branch of the military) and other awesome people like the monarchs and Alanna and the adorkable-but-super-powerful mage Numair Salmalín, we mostly see just the progressive cool people who are running the show--the inevitable backlash isn't really portrayed until the Protector of the Small series. This isn't to say that The Immortals doesn't deal with serious stuff--it has a lot of well-done, thought-provoking material about family and identity and the responsibilities that come with power and the relationship between humans and the environment and a whole host of other awesome things--but Daine really spends much less time fighting patriarchy and much more time fighting magical goddamn fucking scary things, like spidrens (big huge spiders with human heads who eat people) and Stormwings (half-human, half-metal-bird creatures that desecrate the dead and make nasty comments to everybody) and arrogant emperor-mages. Daine often fights with a bow, because she's an awesome archer (there are backstory reasons for this), but mostly she fights with the help of her sassy animal friends. And I'm not kidding about the sassy. Her pony Cloud is like, The World's Sassiest Pony, and the baby dragon she adopts can't even talk but is sassy anyway, and we meet all sorts of creatures like the male badger god, her divine guardian, who is super grumpy and hilarious; Quickmuch, the sass-tastic marmot who basically moons the world's most powerful mage (and cusses him out using language she "must have learned from squirrels"); Flicker, the squirrel who tells Daine she makes a crappy squirrel; Zek, the pygmy marmoset who figures out how to use keys; sassy bats; sassy cats... the world's most charmingly clever wolf-pack... Tamora Pierce basically writes the best animals and they are all in this series. (Faithful even makes a silent, but STILL SASSY, appearance in Book 4.) If you like books where the secondary characters are awesome (which I do), you will probably adore the everloving shit out of The Immortals, because there are just so many awesome side characters, human, animal, and immortal. The only issue with this series is that you might die, because if the scary things (which are very, very scary) don't scare you to death, the cuteness will.
Also: There are zombie dinosaurs. How could you not like a book series with zombie dinosaurs?