You thought I’d forgotten my goal to read every Tamora Pierce Book ever!! Ha! It’s like you don’t even know me and my implacability when it comes to books aimed at middle schoolers. Today I read the first book in the second series about the Circleteers, following the Circle of Magic series. While the books in the first series were about the four Circleteers learning to use their magic and inevitably working together to fend off some natural disaster (and one memorable magical pirate attack), in this series the Circleteers are separated and have to work as individuals! So much so that I’m not even sure I can call them Circleteers anymore! You know, since their powers don’t combine and all. It’s something I’m pretty bummed about.
BUT this series seems to be vastly superior to the first in almost every other way! It’s almost like Tamora Pierce heard my complaints about there being no villains and every character being insufferably good, their only faults being things like “working too hard”. This book definitely has bad guys! And a series of grisly murders! Plus, Sandry is less insufferable than before! She’s 14 now, and has to deal with her own apprentice who seems to annoy her a lot for some reason, so she actually ends up complaining sometimes! Like a real person! I was thrilled. The basic premise for this series seems to be that each Circleteer is out seeing the world, runs across some slightly younger kid with weird magic that no one has ever seen before, and then becomes that kid’s teacher. Apparently the rule in Circleteer land is that if you find an untrained magical kid, you HAVE to become their teacher. So Sandry now has an apprentice who has dancing magic. Which seems a little weird, but, you know, after thread magic, I feel like I’m just going to go with it. I do hope these “strange and unknown magics” become ever more ridic as the series progresses until Book 4 is about Daja finding some boy with magical spit or something.
Here are the two covers! I like the one on the left better, even if he is clearly doing jazz hands
Awards
Best New Character: Wulfric Snaptrap
No matter Wulfric Snaptrap’s personality, he would have won this award based on his name alone. BUT he’s also a police mage, hardened by everything he’s seen. It seemed for a while like he and Sandry were going to turn into a great mentor/novice buddy cop duo, but alas.
Returning Character Honorable Mention: Duke Vedris!
We get to see a lot more of Sandry’s uncle including his steely resolve to both do what’s right and flirt with dancing girls. You go, Duke Vedris!
Sandry’s Improvement Score: +50%=50/100
Although Sandry is vastly less annoying in this book, I still can’t forget that I hate her.
Thing I Most Wish Was Real: Dragonsalt.
Not that I want to become addicted to magical drugs, I just wish drugs had cooler names/backstories like they apparently do here. I imagine drug dealers stealing into dragon caves and using a cheese grater to capture some of this sought-after narcotic right from the sleeping dragon’s scales.
The Play-by-Play
Chapter one
Sandry is living with her uncle, Duke Vedris, since he had a heart attack and no one else can nag him into not having another one like her. She does a lot of random making pieces of fabric move so we get that she has thread magic. Pasco’s friend’s family pays him money to do a good luck dance before they take their fishing boats out. Sandry sees him!
Chapter two
Sandry tells Pasco he has dancing magic, but Pasco thinks that’s stupid. Sandry makes a bet with Pasco about whether or not the fishing boats will do better today or not because of his dancing. Rokat, a rich merchant no one likes has been murdered! Apparently he was a jerk, so no one is sad.
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