Me on Jezebel on The Song of the Lioness

I’m not a fan of Jezebel.com, though I do wind up there sometimes. Sreya sent me a very me-oriented link, however: Alanna: The First Adventure: For The Crossdressing Knight In Every Girl. Jezebel takes a look at YA lit they loved as kids, and evaluate them now. (Not a new concept, but something that does need to be done.)

I make no secret of my abiding love for Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness quartet. These books embodied The Perfect Read when I was in upper-elementary and middle school. I can still remember declaiming them to my mother, how I was SO happy with them, despite never reading the first…

And I think that makes a difference. I began with #2 of 4. In the Hand of the Goddess covers Alanna’s squire years, ages 14 to 18, the years when puberty makes it presence fully known. She is chosen by the goddess, is gifted with her pet cat Faithful, uses her magic regularly, and falls in love for the first time. I read books 2-4 multiple times before I was able to get my hands on #1, and I was disappointed by it. In the First Adventure Alanna is a child (ages 10-13) and doesn’t yet know what she’s doing. She hasn’t found her confidence yet, she’s ashamed of multiple parts of herself (not just being a girl, she also doesn’t want to be a magic user), and it kinda sucks to read about her being friends with people who later turn on her. It’s not a bad book, and there are phrases and scenes that still resonate deeply with me, but I always thought it was the weakest in the quartet.

I also think the Jezebel review is damn weak. It’s hellishly flippant, and comes off, initially, as a pejorative review.

The deal in Tortall is usually that noble families send their female children to a convent to train to be ladies and their male children to the royal palace to become knights when they’re YA novel protagonist age (11 or so), but Alanna and her convenient twin brother Thom arrange to switch places — not because Thom wants to be a lady, but because the nuns also train people in how to use magic and Thom wants to grow up to be a sorcerer. He and Alanna are both naturally blessed with magical powers — they “have the Gift,” as their village wise woman puts it — but Thom is more into wizardry and Alanna is more into whacking things with a sword. So she cuts her hair and traipses off to the palace in order to get better at swordcraft and concealing her gender and Thom gets to learn how to use magic.

Yup: in the Alanna books, magic exists!

I take issue with this description. Emily Gould (no relation) of Jezebel makes it sound like a cacophany of plot devices and cliches, mixed into a soup of–what? What are we supposed to think from this kind of description? If the latter part of the review weren’t favorable, I would assume she was being nasty.

Her descriptions of the plot are also confusing. I know these books inside out and I was confused–why on Earth would she order her sentences this way? Why throw out huge concepts without orienting your reader at all?

These are minor quibbles, though, which should not make us miss the point of the Alanna series which is oh my god, SEX!

It’s merely hinted at in the first book, of course — well, the first book ends when Alanna is fourteen, so! But early on, “Alan” strikes up an alliance with the heir to the throne, Prince Jonathan (she gets to call him ‘Jon.’) Their friendship deepens when she uses her “Gift” to save him from a magically-induced plague, which requires her to call on the power of the Mother Goddess (Tortallians have a rad polytheistic pagan religion going on) and the one witness to her magical cure hears “a man’s voice and a woman’s voice coming from Jonathan and Alan.” This is the closest Alanna has come to being found out! Then, much later, she and Jon are embroiled in a high-stakes magical swordfight with some evil desert demons (long story).

Wait, plague, demons, goddess, WOT? Yes, it is a long story, but it’s not so long it can’t be summarized in a fashion that makes the circumstances clear.

For that matter, why is Emily confusing gender-sex with sexy-time sex, when each deserves its own space? She’s also confusing books 1 and 2, making the unitiated reader even more perplexed. Do we care that Alanna and Jon get together later when we’re examining just the first book in the quartet? If we do, why?

This hint of rom-com banter foreshadows things to come in the rest of the series, when Alanna and Jon are a little bit older, he’s the only one who knows her secret, and there’s lots of unfettered access to each other’s “bedchambers.” The next two books in the series are basically like Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep in the illicit boarding-school boning department, just with more swordplay. Yesss.

I was mad titillated by these books as a nine year old, and also, I suppose, empowered.

Yes, I was “mad titillated” by them, too. I would define these as some of my first ‘grown up’ books. But farking hell, we’re seriously going to describe this as “illicit boarding-school boning”?! This conjures up images of sneaky fraternizing around the palace–Alanna leaves the capital as soon as she has her shield. She spends the next two books questing across the continent. She sleeps with two other men, total. Fuck, she’s afraid of love and the consequences of sex.

By this point, I’m asking when last Emily read the books. I’m wondering if she took the time to skim the descriptions of the other books just to refresh her memory. And I’m remembering why I’m not keen on Jezebel’s pop culture sections.

Clearly Jezebel is more interested in being ‘funny’ than providing a serious second-look at content that has helped shape thousands of young women. They could have looked at Alanna as a person, her culture, her personal fears and how Pierce handles them (She does, after all, get married and have kids–but she doesn’t stop being a knight). They could have examined how other characters treat Alanna. They could have looked at the religions of Alanna world, or compared the gender roles of the nobility vs the common folk. They could have made a study of how ‘preachy’ the books may be, vs. how believable.

Perhaps worst of all, no one in the comments seems to care. Feminsm Ra-Ra.