Skip to main content

Bloodhound by Tamora Pierce

I've been waiting for this book for three years. I loved Terrier--the first book in Tamora Pierce's Beka Cooper trilogy and I looked forward to spending more time in her company. I've been a Pierce fan for a long time now and with this series it was literally like coming home being back in Corus, the capital of Tortall. It was also a nice change of pace to have the story set a few hundred years before Alanna's time, and revolve firmly around the lower classes. Unlike Alanna's day, Beka's Tortall is a place where lady knights roam the countryside freely and girls can grow up to be part of the city guard if they want. That is exactly what Beka's always wanted and, thanks to the Lord Provost's benevolence, she's able to escape the city slums and help support her mother and siblings on a Dog's salary.

In Bloodhound Beka finds herself characteristically partnerless. When one of the senior Dogs is laid up after a riot, Beka is temporarily partnered with her idol Goodwin and the two of them are sent to Port Caynn to run down the source behind a forgery ring that's been pouring silver plated copper "coles" into circulation throughout the realm. Transplanted out of her natural habitat, Beka is literally forced to step far, far outside her comfort zone in order to pass herself off as a flighty Dog who slides by on others' coattails and uses her womanly wiles to take credit for others' successes. Pretty much the polar opposite of her reserved, forthright, and honor-bound self. Going about her task with her standard single-mindedness, she doesn't expect to meet a young gambler who takes a romantic interest in her. She doesn't expect a mad Rogue who lets her people suffer and spends their takings. And she doesn't expect to be left alone.

Bloodhound weighs in at over 550 pages and the entire story is told through Beka's painstaking journal entries. This is a very interesting (at times problematic) installment and not at all what I was expecting. The majority of the story simply follows Beka's daily movements as she prowls through Port Caynn, inserts herself into the underworld, and struggles with her growing isolation and strong need for companionship despite her at times overwhelming natural reticence. I missed Beka's circle of friends at home in Corus as they were absent the majority of the time. I missed Rosto and his prickly friendship with Beka, the way they stretch and counter each other. I found myself painfully uneasy as I watched Beka grow closer to the gambler/bank messenger Dale Rowan. In fact, I longed to step in and help Beka throughout this book. She is an amazingly strong character and I love her. I just wish she didn't have to stumble and fall sometimes. And I wish she didn't have to experience some of the pain she did. She deserves better and she can't seem to see a few very important things. Also, Pierce seemed to lose her way a bit and her usual strengths as a writer seemed oddly absent. At the same time I can be grown up about these things (honest I can) and recognize that perhaps they were necessary and be okay with that. I was underwhelmed with this story but remain very excited to read the third and final book in the trilogy--Mastiff--due out sometime next year. Knock on wood.

Comments

You Might Also Like

Bibliocrack Review | You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian

If I'm being perfectly honest with myself, I've done a shamefully poor job of addressing my love for Cat Sebastian 's books around these parts. I've certainly noted each time her beautiful stories have appeared on my end-of-the-year best of lists, see:  The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes ,  basically every book in  The Cabots series , and of course  We Could Be So Good .  And the pull is, quite simply, this: nobody is as kind and gentle with their characters and with their hearts than Cat Sebastian. Nobody. I haven't always been one for the gentler stories, but I cannot overstate the absolute gift it is sinking into one of Sebastian's exquisitely crafted historicals knowing that I get to spend the next however many pages watching two idiots pine and deny that feelings exist and just  take care of each other  as they fall in love. I wouldn't trade that experience for the world. Not this one or any other.  Only two things in the world people count by months. H

Review | The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, Vols. 1 & 2 by Beth Brower

I feel a bit giddy finally talking to you all about this series. If you'll remember, I fell madly in love with The Q  when it came out a few years ago. Now, Beth Brower is writing The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion — a series of novellas set in London in 1883. Each volume is an excerpt from the incorrigible Emma's journals, and the first two volumes are already available with the third on the way soon. I think they'd make rather perfect pandemic reading. Humorous and charming down to their bones, they're just what the doctor ordered to lift your spirits in this uncertain time that just proves to be too much some days. If you're experiencing one of those days, I suggest giving Volume 1   a go (it's only 99 cents on Kindle, $4.99 for a trade paperback copy). It will surprise exactly none of you that I own print and digital editions of both volumes.  Miss Emma M. Lion has waited long enough. Come hell or high water (and really, given her track record,  both a

The Year Fic Saved Me

Once upon a time, January came for us and proclaimed itself supremely uninterested in taking prisoners. Under the sustained assault, there were simply too many avenues of stress tearing into my brain. On one side of the field stood so many books (as they have always been there for me) ready to be read—to help. And on the other side loomed a distressing number of chasms inside me desperate to find solace and reprieve. But the two could not meet. No matter how many peace talks I attempted to broker.  In February, in a move so unprecedented that I can only describe it as a lifeline thrown down into the deepest of the chasms, my exhausted mind decided it would be a good idea to finally give fanfiction a whirl. Now, there's no getting around the fact that for someone who has read as many novels that involve fic in some way or another as I have—seriously, novels that began as fic, novels written by authors who got their start writing fic, novels about characters who write/illustrate/love