Active Voice

By Tamora Pierce [Pierce at LibraryThing — Pierce at Amazon]

For years, Beka has dreamed of becoming one of the Provost’s Dogs, the guards who keep law and order in the kingdom of Tortall. Now she has joined their ranks, but her talent for sniffing out conspiracies and going after the powerful criminals behind them may get her killed before she has a chance to enjoy it. But Beka’s got one weapon no Rat can escape: she can hear the voices of the dead.

The summer I was eleven, one of my bunkmates at camp lent me Tamora Pierce’s In the Hands of the Goddess, the second of four books about Alanna, a girl who disguises herself as a boy in order to become a knight. It was the book I’d wanted desperately all my life and hadn’t known I wanted, made-to-order for an eleven-year-old girl who wanted nothing more than to be a knight-sorceress herself. When the summer was over, I immediately tracked down the rest of the series and devoured it – and every Tortall book thereafter. I’m not totally a wild-eyed Tamora Pierce zealot – I didn’t really like the Protector of the Small series, and I’ve only read a couple of her non-Tortall books, though I do intend to read them all – but I figure it’s only fair to let you know before you read this review that, say, I listed Alanna as my hero on my college applications.

With my bias out in the open, I can go ahead and say that the Beka Cooper books are phenomenal. The trilogy takes place 200 years before Alanna’s time, before women were forbidden to be warriors. Beka herself is the ancestor of George Cooper, a major character in the Alanna books and one of my favorites. That on its own would endear her to me, but it’s really Pierce’s skill at crafting heroines that makes her such a strong, engaging character. Like Alanna, Daine, Kel, and Aly before her (or after her, depending on how you look at it), she’s smart, determined, and a scrapper, but she’s very much her own person, too.

In large part this comes from having a perspective completely different than the previous Tortallan heroines. Where Daine is a rural commoner and the other three are nobility, Beka comes from urban poor. Pierce paints a rich and complete picture of life in the meanest, dirtiest streets in the Lower City, with all the moral complexities therein: the complicated and mostly unspoken agreements between the Dogs and the Rats; the laws that don’t sit well with Bea, like the legality of slavery; the occasional corrupt or drunk or stupid Dog and the repercussions they have on the rest of the Dogs and the rest of the city. The elaborate use of Lower City slang in both the dialogue and the narrative (the books are told in first person, almost entirely as part of Beka’s journal, which makes her voice especially strong) enhances this, making the world believable and interesting while still being completely clear and understandable. It opens up a part of Tortall we haven’t seen before, and contributes to the feeling that Beka’s story is older than the others’.

I also really like the way the books are structured. I tend to like plot-driven books, and Pierce, as a more character-driven writer, tends to meander a bit, but the Beka books are basically police procedurals. Each book deals with a particular conspiracy, so while the series is able to be episodic and focus on Beka’s growth, the books themselves are held to a very tight plot structure as Beka and her allies work to uncover the criminals’ plots. It’s a compromise that works very well – Pierce doesn’t have to sacrifice the natural growth of the character, but she avoids the disjointed feel of some of her other books.

And finally, hey, how about a few things you don’t normally see in young adult fantasy, or any media at all: a gay character; a transgender character; a heroine who enjoys having safe, consensual sex with a partner who respects her and isn’t punished or judged for it. All of those were in the Beka books, and all of those made me happy as a reader to see – let alone the benefit of tolerant, safe-sex-positive books for Pierce’s target audience of tween girls.

As you can probably tell from this review so far, the Beka Cooper books are running on five cupcakes so far. My only complaint is that now I have to wait at least a year for the next one. Ah, well, I can always reread the Alanna books again.

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Tags: Tamora Pierce

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 6:38 pm and is filed under 5 Cupcakes, High Fantasy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.