Wild Magic
By Tamora Pierce
The (a) story follows Daine, a young orphan with a curiously strong penchant for animals, as she takes up the position of horse handler for the fabled Queen’s Riders in the kingdom of Tortall. But as her journey unfolds, it quickly becomes apparent to those around her that Daine’s connection with living creatures is more than a unique talent: it’s magic. With the help of her newfound friends, including a powerful mage, and the kingdom’s greatest knight, Daine learns to control and use her powers for the good of the realm—and it cannot have come at a more important time.
Because everyday creatures are not the only things Daine has a connection to. Somewhere on the edges of the kingdom, evil is brewing. Creatures thought to be long gone are escaping their prison and wreaking havoc on the land… and Daine can sense their presence.
Now more than ever, the kingdom needs a touch of wild magic. And it’s up to Daine and her friends, human and animal alike, to save the day.
The (A) story is about found family. At the beginning of the book, Daine is freshly orphaned, and disillusioned by the prospect of loved ones. In her mind, caring about anyone is just one more way for her to eventually get hurt. But as she spends more time among the Queen’s Riders, she cannot help but become attached, until she finds herself with a bigger support system than she could ever have dreamed of.
But the story is also about judgement, and the ways society likes to enclose people within labels and expectations. And in the kingdom of Tortall we can also see how these judgements are subverted. The most obvious example of this is through the character Alanna, the kingdom’s greatest knight—and the first woman to ever join the Queen’s Riders. However, another good example comes when they reach the barracks and meet the new trainees, as well as the king and queen. It quickly becomes apparent to Daine that everyone within the Queen’s Riders comes from “all walks of life,” and they refuse to let the labels of their previous lives slow them down. Magic is a gift, not a curse; the king and queen are regal and ordinary people; and a little orphan girl from a small town can become a powerful mage.
So, when I was a kid I was obsessed with animals, and horses in particular. Around the same time I read Alanna, another book by Pierce whose main character, as mentioned above, appears in Wild Magic. Back then, this was my kind of fictional universe: women who were knights and children who could talk to animals.
And while that is still very true to this day, I think I have outgrown Tamora Pierce’s writing.
In the first place, while somewhat unrelated to the actual story, I found myself distracted by the insane number of typos I caught throughout the book. Normally, if I find any at all, it’s usually one or two within the entire text. But this book? There were at least five or six. And I found about three of them on a single page once.
Really makes me surprised at Simon & Schuster.
And as far as the story goes, I had a lot of issues with it. So much so that I eventually started forcing my way through the book just so I could be done with it—which is a terrible way to have to read.
For one, all of the characters are pretty one-dimensional. Pierce attempts to give Daine some inner conflict throughout the plot, but it’s barely touched upon for most of the book, and once her big secret finally is revealed it’s barely of any consequence. And literally every other character is super understanding and forgiving about everything, creating an environment for our main character in which nothing is ever confronted or explored in depth.
Which leads me to another problem. One that seems weirdly contradictory: there is a simultaneous lack of conflict and lack of what I like to call “quiet moments” (though I’m sure there’s a more technical term for it that I’m forgetting about). In other words, there is no convincing moment of the characters just interacting with each other as characters, outside of the overall plot. Almost every piece of dialogue is surface level, never really exploring the characters’ feelings and opinions. And when conflict does happen between them, it either occurs and/or is resolved “off-screen,” or within a page or two. And the same goes for much of the story’s physical conflict: at times Daine will do something and think uh oh, that’s going to be a problem later, and then poof! It’s taken care of, or deemed unimportant after all, in the turn of a page.
There is also a vast amount of showing versus telling, which is probably a big part of the one-dimensionality of the characters. Again, some of the moments of conflict are just given as exposition after the fact, instead of working their way into a scene. And on top of that Pierce narrates the story with a lot of “thinking verbs.” I.e.: instead of just saying “The ground rumbled,” it’s: “Daine heard the ground rumble;” “Daine saw darkness on the horizon,” “Daine felt sad,” etc., which further creates a disconnect between us and our main character’s mind.
There are a couple other things I could mention that took me out of the story, but everything mentioned above was the worst of it for me. In conclusion, for being a 300+ page book, it read like a very young person’s book—probably more fit for the age I was when I first started getting into Pierce’s work.
Not one I would recommend to a fellow adult reader… but I might recommend it to a little kid who is obsessed with animals and knights and magic.
