#alanna was my idol
I feel like one of the most underrated book-series in the whole world is the Song of the Lioness series by Tamora Pierce, in fact, all of her books are entirely underrated.
I will argue to my death that they are better than all of the other young adult fiction that swept the globe (The Hunger Games, Divergent, even the Court of X and Y and those series, even though my only knowledge of them are from my sister’s descriptions.
She writes so well, like her depictions of relationships and gender struggles and her stories are so fantastic and flawless!
The first book in the sotl series is about a girl named Alanna switching places with her twin brother when they are sent away, she was supposed to become a priestess while his son became a knight but they dressed up as each other so he could study priesthood and she could become a knight. Then she spends most of the book befriending the crown prince and his mates, while hiding her identity with the help of her bodyguard, a nurse and a vagabond she met while entering the city. The climax of the book is when she follows the prince into a temple where ghostly entities are sure to kill him, and they reveal her true identity to him.
The next books in the series involve the prince helping her hide her identity while they both enter into ya know, a brief and uncomfortable teenage relationship, while also being romanced by the vagabond, all while the evil cousin of the prince attempts to poison him and her brother becomes a morally-grey magician, and she goes to war and gets hurt endlessly, and her identity is revealed, and she has to go save a foreign lady from execution (she’s also an absolute badass) who becomes the prince’s queen, and she marries the vagabond and they become pirates barons together in some pretty little sea-side county.
It’s an incredible series and each subsequent one tied into the first’s world and she writes female characters incredibly and her fantasy is just the pinnacle of perfection (yes, better than lotr and got and any other example you try to fight me with) and I implore you to at least read the first one because it’s so fantastic
