Reading Tamora Pierce, 'Protector of the Small'

about

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 Protector of the Small are the 9th to 12th (of 15) novels set in Tortall, and follow the progress of Keladry of Mindelan from the first openly female page in more than a century to her attainment of Knighthood and introduction to war.

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; the pantheon of interfering multicultural god/desse/s; knighthood; and the school series format that Pierce adapts. The well-illustrated Annotations cover unusual words, ideas, and objects mentioned, real-world cultural, historical, and literary references, and the major thematic issues that develop throughout the quartet. First Test, Page, Squire, and Lady Knight are all covered on a chapter-by-chapter basis. The Essay considers The Protector of the Small as a revisioning of Song of the Lioness, the structure of the quartet, and the nature of Blayce and the killing devices. A Note on fanfiction surveys the enormous Tortall archive of fanfic as a resource for readers of the quartet, and a Bibliography provides checklists both of Pierce's works and of writing about her.

 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).