Alanna: The First Adventure

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There’s a lot to be said for children’s fantasy. When you’re young reading a book over a hundred pages seems a great feat –and achievement when you finish it- and there are only so many books of that length that pull you to them. Tamora Piece’s Song of the Lioness series was one of those for me. Although I only ever read the first book as a child, I remember being completely immersed in it: captivated by the brave heroine with purple eyes and the fact that knighthood and sorcery were professions. Of course, reading it now as an adult I realise that it’s not an overly brilliant piece of literature, but there is still something about it that inspired me to pick it off the shelf a few days ago.

Alanna: The First Adventure is the introductory story in the Song of the Lioness series that chronicles the adventures of Alanna of Trebond. In order to escape being sent to the convent to become a Lady, Alanna and her identical twin brother Thom decide to switch places so that Alanna can study to be a knight and Thom can study to be a sorcerer. For Alanna, it proves to be a perilous journey, as she must keep her secret hidden from her teachers and peers, which includes the crowned Prince Jonathan. As she struggles with her school workload, hormonal changes, and her growing magical powers, Alanna makes many enemies including Jonathan’s cousin, the charming Duke Roger whom she believes is after the throne.

The elements of a classic fantasy novel are all here: magic, medieval kings, queens, and knights, Gods and demons, and the inevitable battle between good and evil. Piece creates a full world very quickly through her descriptive language and short sentences. But it is a children’s book. While I could still become immersed in the world of the pages, it’s not the most amazingly written book. One major problem is its nonchalance toward time passing and addressing complex themes such as magic. Everything is merely dropped in quickly without any further explanation. While this doesn’t really have too much of a distancing effect, it does create a little disjointedness especially when three months suddenly pass in the middle of a paragraph. With regards to the nature of magic, we’re not given any real exposition or history of it which, again, is fine for when you’re reading it as a child and just accept that the characters have magic, but it does become a little annoying for the seasoned reader.

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Another problem the book has is that it doesn’t build suspense well. Adverbs are favoured to create the appropriate tone, but the dramatic events seem to suddenly happen and are over within a couple of pages. This ties in to the book’s final problem of lack of closure. While it ends at a perfectly agreeable place, you already know that everything that will inevitably follow that big conflict will be completely skipped over when the next book starts. Considering that these are children’s books, I don’t want to use the word ‘lazy’, but Pullman and Rowling managed to have a chapter or two after the climax…

I guess the nostalgia of revisiting a book I loved as a young reader had a stronger influence on my page turning than the power of the book itself, but I’m not saying that this is a bad book. It’s a solid fantasy with a compelling heroine and a reasonably full and developed world. It’s definitely a good one for the kids.

Alanna: the First Adventure was written by Tamora Pierce and first published by Random House in 1983.