Wild Magic

May 14, 2018 7:12 PM - by Tamora Pierce

"Thirteen-year-old Daine has always had a knack with animals, but it's not until she's forced to leave home that she realizes it's more than a knack -- it's magic. With this wild magic, not only can Daine speak to animals, but also she can make them obey her. Daine takes a job handling horses for the Queen's Riders, where she meets the master mage Numair and becomes his student. Under Numair's guidance, Daine explores the scope of her magic. But she begins to sense other beings too: immortals...."
posted by Eyebrows McGee (6 comments total)

So where is a good place to jump back in to Tamora Pierce if I don’t feel like reading the last 2 Alanna books?
posted by bq at 9:56 PM on May 14, 2018

Here would be fine; first book in any of her series works as a starting point.
posted by asperity at 11:10 PM on May 14, 2018

This is literally the first Tamora Pierce book I ever read, so yea, bq, this is a good place to start.
posted by Jilder at 4:17 AM on May 15, 2018

No surprise that this is one of my favorite books in the series. I love Daine and Cloud, and Daine and Onua. The bits with the trainees are a great foreshadowing of the way Tamora Pierce writes about page training in the Kel books - lots of details and process in a way that feels slightly more real life and down to earth than in the Alanna books. Also, the badger is one of my favorite recurring characters, and the Stormwings are such good villains.
posted by ChuraChura at 4:54 AM on May 15, 2018 [2 favorites]

I like the contrast between Daine and Alanna. Alanna was super driven and her adventures largely happened because she wanted to go adventuring (some because she wanted to be a knight at all). Daine, on the other hand, is just trying to survive at all. She has no interest in adventure, not much ambition, just a lot of love for animals. She's often a little exasperated by the adventures, even, which is just lovable.

I also liked that her problem with meditation was real and not something that she could solve on her own or get over. I liked that it was a genuine problem in her life that someone could actually help her with. And I adore Cloud. She is the best.

I do wish that we didn't have quite the level of fan service with the parade of people from the last books, who are apparently now all supernaturally hot. (Aren't they in their thirties by now? Would a thirteen year old even be thinking that?)
posted by Margalo Epps at 5:10 PM on May 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

This book's good, but IMO it needs more time. I just kept wanting more conversation, more interaction with humans and not-humans, more everything. The training stuff was definitely great.

My favorite bit is when Daine thinks about how she must look to Kally, disheveled and covered in bat poo. And then she shrugs it off completely, because there are more important things to deal with at that moment, and Princess Kalasin gets that and works with Daine to do the heroic stuff.

And yeah, parade of past characters is a bit much. That one's handled better in the Kel books, with the ones who matter to the plot getting actual characterization in the current book, and the ones that don't being more obviously not-on-Kel's-level. The physical descriptions of the characters didn't seem as much in Daine's voice as most of the other third-person-POV descriptions.
posted by asperity at 1:20 PM on May 31, 2018