I've read everything Tamora Pierce has written, and liked all of it. That said, the Lioness Quartet is the weakest of all. It's her first work, and it's very Mary-Sue-ish. Allana, the heroine, disguises herself as a boy to sneak off to knight school, where she ends up a better fighter than all the boys, and she sleeps with the handsome prince, AND the young head of the Thieves' Guild, and she's got Magical Twinkly Powers, and she's got a magical cat with purple eyes.
I kid you not.
And yet -- it's GOOD. Not great -- although some of Tammy's later stuff is -- but it's good. It manages to not suck. Part of it is that the characters manage to be, y'know, CHARACTERS -- they do stuff because it's what THEY want to do, not what the plot demands of them. This quite annoyed Tammy when she wrote it, because she'd intended to marry the prince to her heroine, and the two characters just looked at her and said, "You have GOT to be shitting me -- I'd sleep with him, and have friendly sex, and be best friends -- but there's no WAY we're getting married."
Not bad for a YA novel.
I'm also biased towards her work because I so admire her personally. She won a well-deserved Skylark award a couple years back -- science fiction's "nice guy" award. (Hal Clement won two.) Whenever she's at a con, she's always followed by a crowd of pre-teen and young teenage girls, who follow her from place to place like a flock of ducklings -- and she encourages this. Not as an ego thing for her -- but as an ego thing for THEM. When one of these kids shoves a piece of their own writing in front of her, she reads it, and gives helpful advice. She wants this crowd of girls and young women to feel confident in their own voices, in their own lives.
So even if her work sucked -- and it doesn't, in my opinion -- I'd STILL read it, because I admire HER. I admire how she treats her fans, I admire how she treats people in general. I admire that she writes books with strong female protagonists, partially because that's what she wants to write, but partially because she wants those girls who she hangs out with at cons to have them to read.
And I find all her books to be fun, easy reads, but with enough meat in them to be at least a LITTLE filling. And the quality of them does go up with time.
no subject
I kid you not.
And yet -- it's GOOD. Not great -- although some of Tammy's later stuff is -- but it's good. It manages to not suck. Part of it is that the characters manage to be, y'know, CHARACTERS -- they do stuff because it's what THEY want to do, not what the plot demands of them. This quite annoyed Tammy when she wrote it, because she'd intended to marry the prince to her heroine, and the two characters just looked at her and said, "You have GOT to be shitting me -- I'd sleep with him, and have friendly sex, and be best friends -- but there's no WAY we're getting married."
Not bad for a YA novel.
I'm also biased towards her work because I so admire her personally. She won a well-deserved Skylark award a couple years back -- science fiction's "nice guy" award. (Hal Clement won two.) Whenever she's at a con, she's always followed by a crowd of pre-teen and young teenage girls, who follow her from place to place like a flock of ducklings -- and she encourages this. Not as an ego thing for her -- but as an ego thing for THEM. When one of these kids shoves a piece of their own writing in front of her, she reads it, and gives helpful advice. She wants this crowd of girls and young women to feel confident in their own voices, in their own lives.
So even if her work sucked -- and it doesn't, in my opinion -- I'd STILL read it, because I admire HER. I admire how she treats her fans, I admire how she treats people in general. I admire that she writes books with strong female protagonists, partially because that's what she wants to write, but partially because she wants those girls who she hangs out with at cons to have them to read.
And I find all her books to be fun, easy reads, but with enough meat in them to be at least a LITTLE filling. And the quality of them does go up with time.