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#5 Platform: Tortall and Other Lands
Nov. 17th, 2011 07:02 pmSometimes nostalgia is a good guide, and sometimes it's not.
Book: Tortall and Other Lands
Author: Tamora Pierce
Provenance: Borrowed from Westmount library
Some of my favorite books when I was growing up, which I recall first encountering when I was 11 or 12, were the Song of the Lioness quartet by Tamora Pierce, regarding the adventures of a young woman who hid her sex in order to become a knight in the Kingdom of Tortall, and her adventures in first attaining her rank and then around and beyond the realm. I dearly loved them, and read each several times (destroying a couple of books in the process). And while I knew she continued writing more books, somehow, unlike other authors I enjoyed when I was growing up, I didn't keep up with her.
All this is to say that when I was wandering the halls of the library, and I found a collection of short stories by Pierce invitingly placed out for me, I got a nice flood of nostalgia, and decided to take it home with me. As the name, Tortall and Other Lands, suggests, several stories, the first six in the volume, are set in Tortall or other countries within the world in which Tortall is situated, and the rest are set elsewhere, usually in other magic environs, from other worlds to one that is essentially ours with magic, and finally one story that's just set within our world itself. The variety of the stories does help from a sense of repetitiveness, and perhaps reading them out of order would do even more so, so that the Tortall ones would be broken by other stories.
It pains me to say it, but really, I didn't enjoy the collection all that much. It was very hit-or-miss for me, with more misses than hits. I enjoyed some of the stories, including half the Tortall ones, including the first three in the book, dealing with the beginning of the training of a female Shang warrior, and a pair of stories around a tree that gets turned into a man, and how he deals with it, and those who help him (they factor more in the background of the second story including them). I also enjoyed Testing, the final story and the one set in our real world, at a group home. Most of the rest, though, didn't really work for me, and I felt Pierce's prose in most of the stories was straining instead of feeling assured. Some authors really do a lot better with more space, and I fear that Pierce may well be one of those. There's nothing wrong with that, but it does mean that the contents of the stories often feel a bit forced, and her writing isn't spare enough to take up the smaller space gracefully.
Now, here is a caveat: some of the stories in the collection deal with characters from the rest of her Tortall stories, including ones that I haven't read. Perhaps with more knowledge of the characters from these stories, I would have been able to fill in the holes in the story a bit better myself, and so would have enjoyed them more. One should also consider that reading some of these stories (particularly Nawat) probably serve as spoilers for the books from which these characters originally appeared. So I'm willing to think that maybe the fault for some of this is more in me than in Pierce's writing, but for those that are unconnected, I'm reticent to take too much of the blame.
All this is to say that this is probably somewhere to come once you've read a bunch of her books, decided that you like her, and want to see a bit more of some of those characters or what she can do in a smaller setting. Certainly, this isn't the place to start reading her stories. It's a marginal collection, but okay, I'd say. And I think that I may try some of her other books in the future; we'll see if it's a case of undue nostalgia on my part, and that my younger self's admiration of her books doesn't hold now that I'm older, or if it's just that short stories aren't Pierce's forte. I'll hope for the former.
Book: Tortall and Other Lands
Author: Tamora Pierce
Provenance: Borrowed from Westmount library
Some of my favorite books when I was growing up, which I recall first encountering when I was 11 or 12, were the Song of the Lioness quartet by Tamora Pierce, regarding the adventures of a young woman who hid her sex in order to become a knight in the Kingdom of Tortall, and her adventures in first attaining her rank and then around and beyond the realm. I dearly loved them, and read each several times (destroying a couple of books in the process). And while I knew she continued writing more books, somehow, unlike other authors I enjoyed when I was growing up, I didn't keep up with her.
All this is to say that when I was wandering the halls of the library, and I found a collection of short stories by Pierce invitingly placed out for me, I got a nice flood of nostalgia, and decided to take it home with me. As the name, Tortall and Other Lands, suggests, several stories, the first six in the volume, are set in Tortall or other countries within the world in which Tortall is situated, and the rest are set elsewhere, usually in other magic environs, from other worlds to one that is essentially ours with magic, and finally one story that's just set within our world itself. The variety of the stories does help from a sense of repetitiveness, and perhaps reading them out of order would do even more so, so that the Tortall ones would be broken by other stories.
It pains me to say it, but really, I didn't enjoy the collection all that much. It was very hit-or-miss for me, with more misses than hits. I enjoyed some of the stories, including half the Tortall ones, including the first three in the book, dealing with the beginning of the training of a female Shang warrior, and a pair of stories around a tree that gets turned into a man, and how he deals with it, and those who help him (they factor more in the background of the second story including them). I also enjoyed Testing, the final story and the one set in our real world, at a group home. Most of the rest, though, didn't really work for me, and I felt Pierce's prose in most of the stories was straining instead of feeling assured. Some authors really do a lot better with more space, and I fear that Pierce may well be one of those. There's nothing wrong with that, but it does mean that the contents of the stories often feel a bit forced, and her writing isn't spare enough to take up the smaller space gracefully.
Now, here is a caveat: some of the stories in the collection deal with characters from the rest of her Tortall stories, including ones that I haven't read. Perhaps with more knowledge of the characters from these stories, I would have been able to fill in the holes in the story a bit better myself, and so would have enjoyed them more. One should also consider that reading some of these stories (particularly Nawat) probably serve as spoilers for the books from which these characters originally appeared. So I'm willing to think that maybe the fault for some of this is more in me than in Pierce's writing, but for those that are unconnected, I'm reticent to take too much of the blame.
All this is to say that this is probably somewhere to come once you've read a bunch of her books, decided that you like her, and want to see a bit more of some of those characters or what she can do in a smaller setting. Certainly, this isn't the place to start reading her stories. It's a marginal collection, but okay, I'd say. And I think that I may try some of her other books in the future; we'll see if it's a case of undue nostalgia on my part, and that my younger self's admiration of her books doesn't hold now that I'm older, or if it's just that short stories aren't Pierce's forte. I'll hope for the former.
