The Song of the Lioness Quartet

In the ongoing nightmare of 2020-2021, I bought this YA quartet for a rush of nostalgia, recalling loving it in elementary school. I'm writing about it as a set because I really wouldn't read any of the novels individually now. Instead, I just polished them all off in a single weekend, and I think the best thing I can say for them is that they actually made me feel rested and restored to head to work again on Monday and take actions amidst the political chaos of the U.S. right now. Which is not an understatement in the current era!

Here's what held up: Alanna is a great protagonist. She's not perfect, but you really root for her, and her growth is believable. Pierce manages to capture the very distinctive personalities of the various supporting characters without too much explication, and the fantasy/magical elements are interwoven organically throughout the other plot elements. If you want a captivating story that doesn't punish you as a reader but still chugs along with good moments of suspense, all the elements are here.

Here's what I didn't realize as an elementary schooler: Pierce is a second-wave feminist through and through. There are great parts of that (SPOILER ALERT), like how Alanna gets to have premarital sex with three hot men with no judgment about her sexual identity being just another aspect of her lived experience (get it, girl; also, the only sexual descriptions are of kissing, but the steam is still palpable, and it makes me LOL sometimes to realize what I read when quite young as a generally unsupervised reader). But, BUT, the book is insufficiently intersectional. This shows up the most in the 3rd book, when Alanna is living among the Bazhir in the southern part of Tortall, where Pierce slips into some tropes about the sexism of “tribal” populations, and a few things that are just totally gratuitous, like Alanna's servant struggling with the pronunciation of an unfamiliar name at first (actually, now that I'm thinking about it, there's some white savior nonsense at the end of the first book, too). It's not a complete disaster - multiple characters rightly point out that sexism is rampant in the rest of Tortall, as well, and the plot makes clear that Alanna learns a great deal in a cultural exchange that is ultimately pretty balanced, which the clear result in her development is broader, more compassionate thinking. The supporting Bazhir characters are as wholly envisioned as the others, too. Still. I don't think these issues make the novels unsalvageable, but I would never give these books to a child now without some explicit conversation about what could & should have been better done with regard to ethnocentrism in addition to sexism.