2025 read #31: The Woman Who Rides Like a Man by Tamora Pierce.

The Woman Who Rides Like a Man by Tamora Pierce

269 pages

Published 1986

Read from March 29 to March 31

Rating: 3 out of 5

I read the first book in this series, appropriately enough titled Alanna: The First Adventure, in 2018. It wasn’t until three years later that I read the second, In the Hand of the Goddess. Somehow even more time has elapsed between reading the second and third book, which I’m only just now getting around to, almost three and a half years later. Truth be told, though, 2018 feels much farther from 2021 than 2021 does from now. Pandemic time has never made sense, and the pre-pandemic world feels like a different lifetime compared to the eternal present of the 2020s.

More so than when I read the first two books, something clicked with this series; I think I finally get it now. It is, quite simply and gloriously, wish fulfillment for 1980s horsegirls. Alanna is a badass young knight with violet eyes, a magic cat, a sword named Lightning, and a horse named Moonlight. This installment features a series of incidents rather than a plot, but it works. As a hyperlexic child, I would have eaten it up.

Unfortunately, Woman has its share of 1980s yikes: noble desert tribes, a hook-nosed villain, white imperialism, a prophecy that the Northern King must rule the tribes to bring peace. There’s also a dubious age-gap relationship.

On the other side of that coin, the Overton window has shifted so sharply to the right over the last four decades that Pierce’s starter-kit feminism — Alanna has sex outside of marriage! Alanna uses magic birth control! Alanna seeks her own path in life! — would somehow be more controversial today than it was in 1986. If this were somehow published for the first time today, it would soon be banned in fifteen states, and not because of the age gap.