Reading Tamora Pierce 'The Immortals'

Description

Tamora Pierce is a prolific and very unusual modern master of fantasy for young adults and the first such author to appear regularly on the New York Times bestseller lists. The four books making up The Immortals are the 5th to 8th (of 15) novels set in Tortall, and introduce the “Wildmage”, Veralidaine Sarrasri, who appears in most later novels in the Tortall series.

The Notes cover Tamora Pierce's life and work; the world of Tortall (including the geography, cast, and neighbouring cultures); the strange menagerie of immortal creatures who may be friend or foe; and the pantheon of interfering multicultural god/desse/s. The well-illustrated Annotations pay special attention to the many animals who feature, cultural and historical references, and the major thematic issues that develop throughout the quartet. Wild Magic, Wolf-Speaker, The Emperor Mage, and The Realms of the Gods are all covered on a chapter-by-chapter basis, and there is a link to the deleted chapter of The Emperor Mage (in which Daine heals a poisoned camel). The Essay compares The Immortals with its successor quartet, Protector of the Small, for both the brave teenage heroines have a particular and very educational relationship with Pierce's greatest fantasy-beasts, the amazing (and amazingly smelly) Stormwings. The Bibliography has a section detailing works about “˜Tamora Pierce and Children's Writing”.

About the author

John Lennard took his B.A. and D.Phil. at Oxford University, and his M.A. at Washington University in St Louis.  He has taught for the Universities of London, Cambridge, and Notre Dame, and for the Open University, and was Professor of British & American Literature at the University of the West Indies—Mona, 2004–09. His publications include But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Clarendon Press, 1991), The Poetry Handbook (1996; 2/e, OUP, 2005), with Mary Luckhurst The Drama Handbook (OUP, 2002), and Literature Insights on Hamlet, King Lear, Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses. He is the general editor of the Genre Fiction Sightlines and Monographs series, and has written Sightlines on works by Reginald Hill, Walter Mosley, Octavia E. Butler, and Ian McDonald as well as two critical collections, Of Modern Dragons and other essays on Genre Fiction (2007) and Of Sex and Faerie: Further Essays on Genre Fiction (2010).