Author: Tamora Pierce
Publisher: Books on Tape
Rating: worthy
This audio CD is narrated by Trini Alvarado and is quite ably done.
I started in on this thinking this was a young adult novel and it isn't. Alanna isn't even written for the younger end of the YA audience. It's written for an audience of 8 to 10 year-olds which is a bit below what I can normally bring myself to enjoy. I think my own kids would have problems with how truly simplistic this novel is. Having said that, there were some parts which were really well written and which made for an engrossing read. There were just not enough of them. For these two reasons - that the novel was written for a very young audience, and that some of it, even so, was entertaining to me, that I'm rating it as a worthy read for age appropriate audiences.
It features both the trope of twins as well as the trope of girl disguised as boy. I have to express some curiosity as to why we never see the reverse angle on that?! Maybe there are fantasy novels out there where a guy disguises himself as a girl for some reason, but I'm not personally aware of any. There are two movies - completely separate from each other, but which I like to think of as two sides of the same coin which do both these things. One is the excellent and hilarious Just One of the Guys wherein Billy Jacoby, Joyce Hyser, Clayton Rohner, and Toni Hudson are endlessly entertaining. Hyser is the girl who disguises herself as a boy. The reverse side of the coin is the much less entertaining but passable Just one of the Girls (aka "Anything for Love"), a straight-to-video release wherein Corey Haim and Nicole Eggert are watchable if only once. Haim plays a boy who disguises himself as a girl.
The basis of this novel is that Alanna of Trebond and brother Thom are twins who are being sent away from home for the first time to pursue studies, Alanna at a temple in City of the Gods where she will be tamed, and Thom at the palace where he will become, hopefully, a page, then a squire, and finally, a knight. Unfortunately, this plan is the worst nightmare for...both of them! Neither wants their chosen fate, so Alanna hatches a plan for them to swap places, and this they do. It's hoped that Thom's end of this deal will net him a job as a sorcerer's apprentice (which it does), but we seem quickly to lose track of what's going on with him, and focus solely on Alanna.
Taking up a position as a page at the royal palace, Alanna makes friends easily with Raoul, Gareth, Francis, and Alexander, and also does favorably in front of Prince Jonathan and the Duke who is in charge of training. She makes the inevitable trope enemy, too, of Ralon of Malven, who from that point on has daggers out for her, seeking to bully and humiliate her at every opportunity. The studying is hard and Alanna initially becomes very whiny about it, but soon she knuckles down and takes it, well, like a man, as they say!
As I mentioned, Pierce's story is very simplistically written with no attempt to reproduce period-appropriate behavior or speech. The language in use is very modern, which I found rather distracting. Interactions between the palace nobles are bizarre - for example, the prince's uncle shows no deference whatsoever to him or his position, which I found really unrealistic. As I said in my review of Defy I don't expect to read something echoing Beowulf in a novel of this nature. I do not even expect 'thee' and 'thy', but I do expect some sort of attempt by the author to distinguish language and behavior somehow, otherwise it sounds completely anachronistic and detracts from the story.
There were other issues along these lines, such as having Alanna and her servant Coram (not to be confused with Farder Coram) have their own rooms? Honestly? And having the pages give a show of hands for who wants to volunteer to mentor Alanna! I seriously doubt that wannabe knights got all the training and education which these people are depicted as getting. Nor would they be likely to have gone swimming on a regular basis, and then washed up before dinner!
But these quibbles aside, the story in general was listenable. Maybe if I was looking at ten disks instead of four (it's a very short story!) I might have had greater reservations about staying the course, but as short as this was, I had no problem finishing it. It was the second disk which convinced me that this story was too juvenile for my taste and I have no interest in pursuing further volumes in this series. The thing which did surprise me was learning Alanna's age. She is only eleven years old! I had no idea she was that young until close to the end of disk two, so this did put some things in perspective, but even from that new perspective there were still problems!
For me, the entire story sadly devolved into an endless tale of Alanna being bullied and no one doing anything about it. This takes place, of course, in a castle where these kids are training to be, in the end, chivalrous knights. There's no chivalry here. For herself, Alanna already kissed chivalry goodbye by being a chronic liar, persistently lying about the bullying (as well, of course, as her being female!). Jonathan has already kissed off any pretense of being a good guy by failing to throw the bully out of the palace - something he presumably has both the right and the power to do as a prince of the realm. In the end, Ralon left of his own accord.
One really sad part is that Alanna consorts with George, a thief in the nearby town, who is every bit the villain Ralon is: he cuts off the ears of his followers who do no more (stealing) than does George himself!). I don’t see Ralon cutting anyone's ears off, so how is George better than him? The whole premise of the story was rendered nonsense for me at that point. Of course, there had to be a love triangle (it doesn't happen in this first volume, but it seems like it's in the air) and doubtlessly Jonathan and George are the two other corners, but both of them suck as heroic characters. Alanna eventually beats Ralon in a fair fight, but this trivial derailing of the story of Alanna's rise to knighthood is boring and sad when there could be a much greater tale told.
On the favorable side, there were two instances where the writing was really well done and very engrossing. The plague arrived in town. It was some sort of virus, not Bubonic plague, and was only in this town. That's why it seemed to be magically powered, because the prince didn't get sick with it until the magical healers were all but worn-out from healing all the other victims. This is when Alanna reveals that she has the healing power, and she cures the prince. That part was both really well-written, and showed a completely different side to Alanna, which I admit did a lot to win her back into my favor.
The other instance was when Jonathan and Alanna visit the seemingly deserted Black City just for the hell of it and this turns out to be the best part of the novel - especially since Jonathan discovers at this point that "Alan" is really a girl! So, this series is not for me, but I think children of the right age will enjoy it.
