1983 fantasy, first of a tetralogy. Alanna wants to be a knight and
have adventures; her twin brother Thom wants to be trained in magic. So
they swap roles, and Alanna disguises herself as a boy.
So far so standard, but this is 1983. Even Arrows of the
Queen won't come out for another four years; fantasy coming out this
year is mostly set in a modern world (Tea with the Black Dragon, So
You Want to Be a Wizard), parodic (The Colour of Magic), or
hackneyed (Robert Jordan's Conan pastiches, volume 3 of The
Belgariad). So while Girls as protagonists may be quite standard in
folk songs, they aren't yet common in Fantasyland, and we get a huge
heaping of Girls Can't.
There's a relatively light dusting of fantasy here, too; we have
something very like the mediæval English system of pages and squires,
even if some people do have magical powers, and while Alanna has a
healing gift (to go with, sigh, her purple-irised eyes) that's mostly
not what this story is about.
So we get the standard bullying (and the standard incompetent
supervision, though it's sadly historically accurate), the standard
making friends, and so on. There's a great deal more education than in
the historical version (these knights are all able to read and
write!) for no reason that's obvious yet. Everyone who likes Alanna
is Good; everyone who dislikes her is Evil, though some of them hide
it at first. The world's dimmest prince can't believe that his nice
cousin and heir might want him dead, so clearly that education has
gaps in it.
It doesn't have a great deal to say now, but the reason why I read
it now is that there wasn't much fantasy saying this stuff at all
forty years ago and I wanted to get some historical perspective. The
tetralogy was originally written as one great doorstop of a novel, and
this chunk of it doesn't come to any particular conclusion.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.