I was extremely excited when the library notified me about the interlibrary loan of Trickster’s Queen (Young Adult Fantasy, 444 pages) by Tamora Pierce.

“Aly: No longer just a master spy, but a master of spies. Can she balance her passion for justice and her compassion for others, and at what cost?
Sarai: Beautiful, dramatic, and rash – will she fulfill the role chosen for her by destiny?
Dove: She has always stood in Sarai’s shadow. Can she prove to the world that she herself is a force to be reckoned with?
Nawat: Half crow, half man. He wants Aly for his life mate, but will the revolution make that impossible as they step into new roles to change the future?”

THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW.

I was maybe a little surprised that this book skipped the entire winter at Tanair Castle on Lombyn Island, but it does make sense from a publishing perspective because there really isn’t much plot-relevant conflict. The family mourned, everyone did chores and found ways to amuse themselves during the winter, Aly trained other spies, and Sarai refused to continue sword lessons. Those last two points are fairly important to the rest of the story for character development purposes and I’m not really sure if someone who didn’t read the prologue would have the same experience. (I only mention this because I do actually know people who don’t read prologues).

There were two paragraphs in this book that really struck me because this is a fantasy book published in 2004 and these paragraphs could easily be used today.

‘”Idiots,” whispered Dove contemptuously. “Don’t they realize the whole city knows what it means when they put men in plate armor on the palace walls? Why not paint a sign that says We’re frightened and hang it on the gates?”‘ (Pierce, page 55).

and

“Did the regents understand how much they revealed by ordering their men to break up gatherings? Surely they’d been around government long enough to know it was a bad idea to let people know you feared them in groups that were not even very large.” (Pierce, page 117).

I guess for the context of this post in the future, when it’s possible someone might not be living in these interesting times of 2026 with us in the United States of America, for the last year, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement has become an armed, armored, and masked entity using force and intimidation to assault U.S. citizens, immigrants, and non-white people on the streets of U.S. cities. This entity continues to upgrade their personnel equipment, adding body armor, assault rifles, and helmets and driving unmarked vehicles.

The parallels in some of the sections of this book and the current world in which I live are extremely interesting to me, especially farther into the book when the rulers behave in more and more unstable ways.

This is one of the many reasons why reading science fiction and fantasy stories is actually crucial to how we develop has humans. Even though we don’t necessarily live in a world of magic and fantasy, we’ve all seen tyranny, we’ve all witnessed (or experienced ourselves) the plights of workers against the wealthy. We’ve seen starvation and deprivation. And when we read these fantasy and science fiction stories, we see people who see others suffering and do something about it. We see justice served to greedy evil people and kindness and compassion win the day.

These stories give us hope that every small kindness can work towards a bigger goal; a goal where we can create and live in a world governed by compassion and selflessness.

Dove is the prime example of what truly caring about your people looks like. She isn’t flashy and beautiful like Sarai, but she does genuinely care. She goes into the market and talks to everyone about how their business is doing, their families, what might impact their ability to live, and she listens. She pays attention when the merchants show concern about bad harvests and upset trade routes. She pays attention to book sellers and cloth merchants and workers on the dock. Even more interesting to me is that Dove spends all of the previous book and over half of this book believing Sarai will be the Trickster’s Queen but I’ve felt this whole series as though Dove was a much better fit for the role.

As it turns out, my feelings were correct!

I didn’t want anything bad to happen to Sarai but I also didn’t expect her to elope to Carthak with a healer. I’m glad she did, though, because it means she’ll get to have a happy life instead of the trap of royalty.

This was a good book and the series was a satisfying read, though I’m still not thrilled with how a happy ending for women means marriage and children because Aly and Nawat do wind up married and expecting at the end of the book. Overall, I’m going to rate this probably as a high three on my rating scale. While I did borrow it from the library, I might see if I can find a used copy to pick up somewhere. And I am probably likely to reread the series again.

Pierce, Tamora. Trickster’s Queen. Random House, Inc., 2004.