jamjar

What I really, truly adore about Pierce's Tortall series is - not just that there are these female characters who are confronting societal issues and pressures surrounding their femaleness - but that they help each other out. In both the Immortals and Protector series, Alanna acts as a mentor and guide to Daine and Kel. This goes against the grain of most girl-centred children's lit, in which the strongest female presence is set in place to dominate the developing female presence, most often in a malicious sort of way. I'm thinking historically of texts such as "A Little Princess" where Sara Crewe is very much enslaved to what's her face, Miss Minchin I think - and also the contemporary Gaiman's "Coraline", where the Other Mother is inherently threatening and stifling. They present this dialectical argument that girls can only be heroines if they can struggle with and defeat villainnesses, which of course means that there is a dearth of fore-mothers because all the preceding generations to this one are obvs. so very evil omg. (Of course the inescapable irony is that the girl heroes grow into the women villains.)

Pierce disrupts that process and establishes a continuum of support, whereby Alanna acts as older sister to Daine and benefactor to Kel, and Daine acts as older sister to Kel, and Kel in turn in one scene in, I think it was Squire, provides a mentoring role to two hero-struck young girls.

Ahahaha, sorry again. It seems I have my English-major brain turned on tonight. *facepalm*