Paul's Reviews > In the Hand of the Goddess

It took me too long to finally return to the Song of the Lioness series, which opened with the excellent Alanna: The First Adventure. But I'm glad I did, and now that I've refreshed my memory with how fun and easy to read these middle-school-to-YA fantasy novels are, I'll probably just power through and finish them.

In the first book, we're introduced to Alanna, who disguises herself as a boy to fulfill her dream of becoming a knight. She makes great friends, fights baddies, and manages to keep her secret for the most part. As you might expect, the second book is more of the same, only somewhat more episodic as the action stretches over several years. As with many stories relying on a semi-magical world, the deuses ex machina proliferate to ensure our heroine is never in any danger she can't scrape her way out of.

It's pretty easy to pick this story apart, but that would be pretty curmudgeonly; this is a fun series, and certainly more worth reading than, say, Marion Zimmer Bradley's similarly feminist-inflected fantasy for adults, which is weighed down with its own sense of self-importance and our knowledge of the author's horribleness.

I'd recommend this pretty highly for readers age 10+.