'Squire': A Keladry Story from Tamora Pierce

I am currently reading this book: Squire, a book in one of the series by Tamora Pierce, set in a place call Tortall.  Ms. Pierce is much loved by young readers, judging from the scores of web pages devoted to her on the Internet, but I must pay my five cents' worth of homage, because I am enjoying the story so much.

Just Google 'Tamora Pierce', and you will learn all you probably wish to know about the author, while doing the same with 'Keladry, Protector of the Small', will give you volumes of detail about the protagonist, Keladry of Mindelan.  Teachers: if you begin to see hordes of young women named 'Keladry', this would be evidence about how much this character--and her creator, Ms. Pierce--is beloved among parents of a certain age.

One thing I must remark on is that Tamora Pierce has the gift of putting words into the mouths of her characters that suit them perfectly.  Of course, without this gift, the author would probably not be widely read; I have read books by some people where this ability is tragically absent.  Tragic not because it is an obstacle to their fame and popularity--some of these authors are top-selling people--but because in my twisted mind, being able to write dialogue that really reveals the character's thinking, and helps us to relate to them via our interaction with people we know, and the things they might say, really makes the story pop out of the printed page.

Pierce's heroine in the first story set in the Tortall Universe was Alanna, a noble girl who aspires to be a knight.  It turns out that there have been other female knights before Alanna, but in this first story, it is as if Alanna is trying something impossible, and Tortall society has taken a conservative turn, and Alanna has to fight like mad.  Pierce gives Alanna an advantage, in that the girl has magic gifts, which she desperately needs in order to battle her magic-wielding adversaries.

A couple of decades later, along comes Keladry, who is as unmagical as she could be, and instead of an advantage, she has a handicap, namely a huge protective instinct, which impels her to take on responsibilities with no regard to how thinly she's going to be spread.  (The illustration shows her holding a baby griffin that inflicts painful bites and scratches on Keladry while she tends it, and while various knights challenge her to trials in the tournaments, which leave her black and blue.)

While Alanna is presented as fighting to be allowed to join the ranks of the forces that have become the exclusive domain of males, Keladry just wants to be qualified to do her thing on her own terms.  In some ways their battles are parallel: they echo the battle in today's world for women to have the same freedoms as men.  But where Alanna became a champion of women in her society, Keladry comes across as someone stubbornly pursuing the right to take on her own low-profile battles to protect every underdog she encounters.  We've all met women of both these types, and neither type is superior to the other.  Many kids of both sexes will probably identify more readily with Keladry's anti-bullying stance--though Alanna faced up to bullies in her time--simply because many of us have met people like Keladry, quiet, unassuming, a little stodgy, and utterly reliable.  We desperately needed Tamora Pierce to give us such a heroine, with just a touch of well-deserved glamour!