I know you are just hankering to know what happens in the next Tamora Pierce series, The Immortals, and don’t worry, so was I! That’s why I read all of Wild Magic yesterday so I could report back. Our heroine, Daine, is a 13-year-old orphan brimming over with “wild magic”, which basically boils down to souped up Eliza Thornberry powers.
Where Darwin is played by a horse and Donnie is a fantasy-medieval hipster
And her dad’s unfortunately not Tim Curry, but some (probably super-magic) mystery man her mom met this one night whom she’s never met. This concept is great because it combined my 13-year-old love of medieval-fantasy MAGIC with my love of HORSES, Daine’s primary animal companions. While she tries to flee her past and understand her powers, she ends up in Tortall, helping out my girl Alanna and a new character, Numair the hot sorcerer/hipster/lech. Because random mythical creatures (“immortals”) are attacking Tortall! Of course.
Middle School Patricia took awhile to warm to Daine, and even then she was never as cool as Alanna. She thought Daine was kind of boring and too shy, even though Daine’s actions pretty much mirrored what her own would have been. Alanna is what Middle School Patricia wishes she was: brave, tough, and not taking any crap. Daine is what she actually was: shy, nervous, and often confused by social interactions. Middle School Patricia was, perhaps, frustrated that here was someone even more of a wuss than her who still had awesome magical powers. And she got to hang out with Alanna. Middle School Patricia was totes jeal.
Meanwhile, my current problems with this book mostly relate to Numair, whose present inoffensiveness I can’t disentangle from my knowledge about where his storyline is going. I hoped that I had a George-like misunderstanding about him in middle school, but upon this reread I found that my memories are correct: he’s at least 28 in this book, and although he hasn’t made a move on Daine yet (besides some jubilant hugging) it’s just a few books away. In this book, he’s Daine’s teacher and clearly a sort of surrogate father-figure since she never knew her own. Which makes their eventual “happily ever after” that much creepier. But I’ll stop getting ahead of myself. For this book, anyway, the Creep Factor is a pretty low: 1 out of 5.
In case you have to ask, Middle School Patricia, of course, thought Numair was totally hot and completely romantic because, duh, he had long hair, and could turn into a hawk. Luckily, though she too was 13 at the time, she didn’t immediately start macking on any 28-year-old father figures.
Wild Magic by Tamora Pierce
Book 1 of The Immortals
Typical Tamora Pierce Checklist:
Magical Animal Companion(s): Cloud, the sassy mountain pony!
Magical Bling: a silver badger’s claw acquired in a dream!
Love Interest(s): None yet, but Numair gives her a nickname so you know it’s coming
Previous Tamora Pierce Character Sightings: Thayet (8), Alanna (7), George (4), King J (2), Dead characters living on through namesakes (4)
Play-by-Play
Chapter one: Girl with a Pony
Daine and her trusty steed, Cloud, get jobs with Onua, a horse trader headed towards Tortall because Daine seems to be able to talk to horses. Onua works for the Queen’s Riders, which are a corps of swift men and women warriors protecting small villages from raiders. They’re led by Queen Thayet!!! Daine dreams a badger is annoyed with her and then gives her a piece of its own hand. Then she wakes up and finds A SILVER BADGER CLAW OMG
Chapter two: The Hawk
Daine and Onua get attacked by Stormwings, mythical creatures that feed on corpses. Except they are totes real! They are like human/birds with metal, razor sharp wings. With her archery and magical animal powers, Daine fights them off, then finds the hawk they were chasing. The hawk is sick and Onua thinks it is SUPER IMPORTANT to cure it. Then Alanna shows up!!!! And saves the hawk, of course. Turns out, it was a man all along!
Chapter three: Spidrens and Meditation
Daine wakes up in the middle of the night and feels something is amiss! Alanna is awake too, and they end up fighting off spidrens: human/spider monsters! The hawk man turns out to be Numair the Sorcerer who was spying and got stuck as a hawk. They bond over hair products and make it to Corus, the capital. Read the rest of this entry »