Active Voice

Alanna: The First Adventure, In the Hand of the Goddess, The Woman Who Rides Like A Man, Lioness Rampant
By Tamora Pierce [Pierce at LibraryThing -- Pierce at Amazon]

Women in Tortall are not warriors, but 11-year-old Alanna would much rather become a knight than a lady or a sorceress — so she hatches a plan to trade places with her twin brother. Disguised as a boy named Alan, she enters training as a page, hoping to become a knight before she is discovered. As Alanna works to prove herself, learning both fighting and magic, she becomes friends with Prince Jonathan — and with George Cooper, a rogue who is the King of Thieves. But all of her friendships and new skills may not be enough when only Alanna realizes that the prince’s cousin, a powerful sorcerer himself, is plotting to take the throne to Tortall… And it seems like only Alanna will be able to stop him. (Very mild uncovered spoilers behind the cut.)

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It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Mea culpa.

By Lloyd Alexander [series on LibraryThing — series on Amazon]

Taran longs to be a hero, but he seems destined to be merely an Assistant Pig-Keeper. However, even that’s a pretty big responsibility when the pig in question can tell the future, and when the evil Horned King, agent of the Death Lord Arawn, has his eye on her. With a ragtag bunch of companions, including the spirited Princess Eilonwy, the bumbling bard Fflewddur Flam, the loyal beast of indeterminate species Gurgi, the grumpy dwarf Doli, and more, Taran must fight first the Horned King, then Arawn himself – and discover who he is and what he really wants to be in the process.

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By Bruce Coville [Coville at LibraryThing -- Coville at Amazon]

I’m going to do something a little new, here. It’s no secret that Bruce Coville is my favorite author, and I can’t pretend to be objective about his books — I get too caught up in fangirling. I read all of these books in marathon sessions over the course of a week, so I wasn’t pausing for deep thoughts. Basically, I just want to get these book reviews out there, so I’ve decided to include two short reviews here: one of Bruce Coville’s series The Unicorn Chronicles — including the newly-released book Dark Whispers — and one of his Rod Allbright’s Alien Adventures series.

The Unicorn Chronicles: A strange man begins following Cara and her grandmother, and the incident sends her from her home town into a whole new world — literally. Cara finds herself in Luster, the land of unicorns, where she must deliver a message the unicorn’s queen. But that’s harder than it seems: not all of Luster’s creatures like humans (or unicorns). Cara soon finds herself in the middle of a centuries-old war between the unicorns and a clan of humans who have sworn to hunt them into extinction.

Rod Allbright’s Alien Adventures: Rod Allbright is a typical kid — albeit a clumsy one. Then a group of aliens crash-lands in his science project, and reveal that the school bully who torments Rod is actually a villain wanted galaxy-wide for crimes of unspeakable cruelty. Things get even worse from there when it turns out Rod’s enemy may be the only one who knows what happened to Rod’s long-missing father.

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

Though for ten years, it’s been legal for girls to train as pages and aspire to Knighthood, Keladry of Mindelan is the first one who has actually done so — and being legal doesn’t make it easy. She’s put on probation as a page, something never done with a boy; she’s hazed by bullies; she’s treated unfairly by the training masters. No one, it seems, wants to see a lady knight. But Kel is determined, and she won’t let anything — or anyone — stand in her way.

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We’re introducing a new feature at Active Voice! Usually we review books that have come out in the past couple of years, but with our Old-School Reviews we’ll be talking about the books from our childhood and before. Our first Old-School Review features the fantastic Mr. Bruce Coville.

By Bruce Coville [Coville at LibraryThing - Book One at Amazon; Book Two at Amazon; Book Three at Amazon]

Nina “Nine” Tanleven is thrilled to be performing in a local play, but the excitement gets to be a little too much when she and her new friend Chris both start seeing the Woman in White, a ghost who may be trying to sabotage the show. And the adventures don’t stop there, because exposure to the Woman in White has made the girls more sensitive to ghosts, and they soon find themselves solving mysteries about Confederate soldiers and mad painters, hidden treasures and lost masterpieces…and more than a little bit of danger.

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