Wild Magic

Image credit: Book Depository

After a long stint of broadening my literary horizons and reading challenging reads, I’ve decided it’s time to reward myself with a return to my literary guilty pleasure: children’s fantasy. This week I returned to the exciting land of Tortall with its lady warriors, handsome mages, and the new addition of a great many mythical monsters. This week’s read was book one of Tamora Peirce’s The Immortals quartet: Wild Magic.

The book introduces Daine, a thirteen-year-old girl who’s got a special knack with animals. Leaving home and taking a job as a horse-wrangler’s assistant, Daine discovers that her gift with animals is more that a gift: it’s wild magic. When she and her boss Onua are attacked on the road by a monster that hasn’t been seen in Tortall for four centuries, Daine’s humble worldview is thrown into array when she suddenly finds herself in the company of the King’s Champion, Alanna, the most powerful mage in Tortall, Numair, and the King and Queen themselves. Numair takes Daine on as his apprentice, eager to show her how to control her magic and strengthen it, which comes in handy when it becomes apparent that many more monsters and beasts, known as Immortals, have been released from the Divine Realms and are roaming free. And with a war looming on the horizon, Daine must harness all the power and strength she has to defend her human and animal friends.

Definitely an introductory book, Wild Magic very quickly puts us into the Kingdom of Tortall and gets us invested in the character of Daine. Like the Song of the Lioness quartet, Pierce establishes a likeable, complicated, and strong female protagonist with a strong sense of righteousness and a nurturing nature that we immediately get on side of and relish in her journey of self-discovery and growth.

It’s a simple book akin to The Chronicles of Narnia or Pierce’s previous quartet in that the prose is very easy to read and not a lot of time or words are wasted to describe pointless page-fillers. An easy 350+ pages, Wild Magic has something meaningful and important on every page that drives the narrative forward, which makes it so monumentally easy to power through. I started the book on Monday morning and have only been able to read in bouts on the walk to and from work as well as 10 minutes of my lunch breaks, and I still managed to finish it in 5 days.

Image credit: Audible

There is plenty of action, drama, humour, and emotional links to be had in this book, as well as the joy of new interpretations of ancient and mythical creatures. While there are plenty of cool monsters that are new and unique to the story alone, there are also beasts that have been gracing literature for years: dragons, griffins, krakens and the like; new depictions of these classic creatures that gives the book a cool and fresh edge.

Tamora Pierce is a classic name in children’s fantasy, and I’m keen to start the next instalment of The Immortals.

Author: Tamora Pierce, 1992

Published: Simon Pulse, and imprint of Simon and Schuster Children’s Publishing Division, New York, 1992.

Wild Magic is the first book in Pierce’s The Immortals quartet.