It is half past five in the morning local time, and after being awoken by a phone call from someone who didn't know I was in a different time zone, I can't get back to sleep even though I really want to. So here I'll write down some of what I can't sleep for thinking and see how that turns out.
When I was in seventh grade or so, one of my friends introduced me to the work of an author named Tamora Pierce. (This was actually my second introduction to her work, but I had been in first grade and forgotten all about the first time.) I wound up reading everything this author had ever written, which was already a pretty big selection, and which has grown by two lovely big books since then.
See, these were the books I'd been wanting to read for a long time. I had spent my entire life being irritated by how few books there were about girls; if I wanted to read a good story with a strong main character and meaningful plot, I would have to just accept the fact that it was about a boy (or a tomcat or a male owl, in the animal stories I preferred for a while). Which meant, to my young mind, that it wasn't about me. Now here was an author who was writing the books she'd wanted to read when she was my age--the strong fantasy novel about a girl--and here I was with a taste for exactly that. As an added bonus, these books were pretty hefty, and as you get into the newer ones you find that the editors were giving her more and more pages in which to write.
It has been twenty-five years since Tamora Pierce published her first book, and her most recent book has only been out since November of last year.
That considered, the continuity is fairly impressive; she's pretty good about including callbacks to the events of previous books to give returning readers a sense of reality and some way to get oriented in the space the story exists in. Corus is always the capital of Tortall, and it always has a magnificent palace; after the events of Lioness Rampant it is always inhabited by the king and queen who were installed in that book. Characters assume roles and stay in them until something happens to cause them to leave. There is a consistent calendar and a consistent map, frequently referred to, and the reader may check the story against the map or elapsed time against the year numbers. Ages are consistent: it is very possible to establish a definite year of birth for nearly every character in the series and they age realistically. This probably sounds pretty basic--the mechanical underpinnings of world-building, the boring stuff--but I miss it very much when authors omit it (ever read a book like that? it's like swimming through mud sometimes), and this one does it very well.
Another aspect that I'm fond of is how clearly the message of each story, the "salient truth" as my Creative Writing teacher called it, comes through without obscuring the story itself. Why go off on a long Author Filibuster (thanks, TVtropes!) about how war is horrible when you can show a young knight wandering through the pillaged remains of the refugee camp she was assigned to protect and mourning every one of the dead she sees? Why make the narrator talk about philosophical questions when you have a twelve-year-old girl whose mentor/father figure/sole positive adult influence is a scholar and she has tough questions arising from her own life? Characters think because they are put in places that force them to think, and the author lets them have their own thoughts. Characters come to conclusions that the author obviously disagrees with sometimes, but all she does is advance her position through another character--and let later events sort them out. It's a tool of good writing, and one I admire.
Yes, this is the kind of thing I think about early in the morning when I can't sleep. I'm getting tired again now, and so is my phone. Sadly, my poor laptop has died, so I may have some issues until I get home.
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