Alanna: The First Adventure (Song of the Lioness Book One) by Tamora Pierce
241 pages
Published 1983
Read from October 4 to October 6
Rating: 2 out of 5
I forget what drew my attention to this book. Someone mentioned it as a formative book during their childhood, but was it a friend? Some random person writing online? It was just a couple weeks ago, but who knows!
This is a book that shows its age. Its simplistic plot, derivative setting, and generic characters place it firmly in the late '70s and early '80s kids' fantasy tradition. Most dated of all is its second generation feminism. The titular main character is a girl in a feudal society, the scrappy daughter of a petty nobleman; she switches places with her twin brother in order to receive the training of a knight-to-be. She finds joy and fulfillment in masculine-coded activities—learning tactics and battle history, practicing the sword and discipline—and hates the fact that she was born a "silly" girl. She is sternly admonished by wise authority figures that the gods made her a girl, and she can no more change that than anything else about herself, but that being a girl and staying true to herself are both worthy endeavors. The message is clear: Feminine-coded things are silly, but a girl who likes masculine-coded things is special and kicks ass and is a worthy heroine, just so long as she always remembers the fact that she's a girl and doesn't blur her own understanding of her gender.
As with other YA books of its time, Alanna was perhaps best enjoyed by its intended audience around the time it was written. I'm sure it would have made a powerful impression on me had I read it in, say, 1991 rather than 2018. As it is, it's the sort of antique relic of early YA feminism that reminds us of how far social norms have come—and also, most depressingly, how far our society could slip back in these reactionary years.
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