I am thankful for Tammy Pierce

In which I hero-worship her. Because I haven't done enough of that already.

I first read Song of the Lioness when I was 13, and everything else shortly afterward. The Trickster and Beka Cooper series as they were published. I have read them all innumerable times, and own them all. When some unknown person stole (ie borrowed and never returned) my Lioness Rampant, I sort of grieved for it. These books are my comfort bedtime reading, and as a result, I have most of them sort of memorized. I thought I could never love them any more than I already did.

And then Mark-who-reads started reading them.

And then suddenly, they were ten times more fabulous. Because if there's one thing I love about Mark's chapter-by-chapter reviews, it's his insightful commentary on something so new to him, and so beloved by the rest of us.

Because at age 13, there was a lot I took for granted. I found it awesome that a girl could disguise her gender for eight years to train to be a knight, but I didn't realize just how revolutionary that was -- for 1983, that is. There was nothing like it in the 90s, and in fact, I don't think there's anything like it even now. When I was growing up, if you wanted female protagonists, you had to choose between Laura Ingalls Wilder, Nancy Drew, or the American Girl dolls, all of which are dated, in their times and their attitudes towards women in the world. Books that cheered girls for being girls were few and far in between, and books that showed a character cross-dressing? Well, others like that haven't really been written yet.