Alanna: The First Adventure Analysis

It's Made Up, And Your Point Is?As you'll observe in many—er, all—fantasy novels, the location is an invented world, meaning that author Tamora Pierce took ideas and bits and pieces from existi...

We see things through Alanna's eyes for most of the story, which is great because we empathize with her and feel her pain. Not literally, thank goodness, since she gets way more beatings that we're...

Alanna starts out a ten-year-old kid, and winds up learning and accomplishing a bunch. So, like in other works of Young Adult Literature, we see a youthful protagonist finding her place in the worl...

To Alanna, becoming a knight is Serious Business. Because she's our main viewpoint character, that colors our perception of the story. When Alanna first puts on her page uniform and prepares to mee...

Alanna experiences most of the action in the book, so even though she's not technically the narrator (check out our "Narrator Point-of-View" section for more on this), we're going to talk a lot abo...

The title, Alanna: The First Adventure is one of those straightforward titles that is like, "Guess what? The book is named after the main character!" Subtle, we know.But it also clues us into a few...

In the very-very end of the book, Alanna agrees to be Jonathan's squire, pledging her life to him. Then she takes a nap. Exciting, huh?But if we backtrack a bit, we see that Alanna and Jonathan hav...

We're talking youth literature here, so Alanna isn't mind-bogglingly difficult to read and understand. We spend a lot of time in Alanna's head, and since she's only ten or eleven years old througho...

Twins in TroubleAlanna and her twin brother Thom are in the not-so-hot position of being sent to the medieval-fantasy equivalent of boarding school. They decide to switch places so that each can do...

Tamora Pierce originally wanted to write for adults—until she realized that adults are boring. Writing for young adults gives her joy. (source) The Alanna books started out as a much longer novel...

We don't see much in the way of physical affection or sexy-times in this book, never fear. There are occasional allusions to sex (as when Mistress Cooper gives Alanna the "birds and the bees" talk)...

Turns out that since Tortall is a made-up fantasyland, the book doesn't contain a lot of references to stuff in our world. Imagine that! There are some general crossovers, like ideas associated wit...