The Emperor Mage

This is my favorite book in the Immortals quartet. There are so many things I love about it - Alanna plays a larger role here than she does in the other books, you see a whole new country, great world building, and some new gods. This is the book in the series where things start coming together. I love it.

1/30/12:
Continuing my re-read of the series. This is still my favorite of the Daine books. There is just so much to adore! I loved seeing Carthak and it's Egyptian-esque culture. The world-building junkie in me was extremely happy. I loved that we saw Alanna more, and Duke Gareth and Gary had cameo appearances. I loved that the gods were front and center, and I can't even begin to describe how awesome the dinosaurs were.

i really wish i knew exactly how to feel about this book. like... it's easy to just write it off as "racist" and move on as some seem to have, and there's for sure a lot of worldbuilding here i don't love. but that really doesn't sit right with me. there is some superficially white savior-adjacent coding to the plot, but it's hardly the most egregious example i've ever seen and there are plenty of mitigating factors. ultimately not my call.

like... maybe don't have your mostly-white progressive utopia country show up to do diplomacy with a much-more-brown country and discover that pretty much all of the world's racism and sexism and literal slavery is located in that specific country. and that the guy running the underground railroad show more smuggling slaves out is... checking my notes here... literally a white guy originally from the mostly-white progressive utopia country.

OK SERIOUSLY WHAT THE HELL.

mitigating factors are the fact that the biracial prince is aiding & abetting said abolitionist movement. and there is some narrative agency given to characters who are slaves. it's fleeting, and this book badly needed someone in that position to be more of a true deuteragonist. or like... to just not do any of this in the first place. but... idk. i've read worse, and probably subjected worse things to less scrutiny. and it's that last part that makes me want to temper my reaction here somewhat.

i also continue to be very frustrated with the direction numair and daine's relationship is going. like, it's not QUITE jacob black level creepy, but wow is it ever much closer than i'd like. and it's deeply frustrating because i really love daine and i really WOULD love numair if it hadn't been obvious since the first book that the two of them were endgame and holy wow should they ever not be for so many reasons.

i'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, though. these books are still damn well-written and i sincerely wish that they were the kind of books i grew up reading. and i just don't think that a lady who genuinely seems to be doing her best and from what i can tell seems to have gotten better and better over the course of her career at trying to avoid these kinds of biases deserves to be raked over the coals for what she wrote fully thirty years ago. and even the things that make me uncomfortable (and make others write her off entirely) are really not all that bad compared to what a lot of her contemporaries were doing? like... i fully acknowledge this is messy, and i'm not going to scold anyone who finds any of it to be a dealbreaker. but i love daine and i love this writing style, and, again, i hardly think this is the most egregiously problematic book ever. i just am doing quite a bit of handwringing about it because i clicked so hard with the first two books and i can tell the author is a generally good person who wants the world to be a better place and is doing her best, and i really like the way she writes. show less

5

Taking Daine outside the safe place of Tortall into enemy territory in Carthak, this was my favorite book of The Immortals. Here, Daine is forced to navigate an unfamiliar world, and is at the mercy of unfamiliar gods (about the only instance of divine intervention in this series that I found palatable). Throwing a character into a circumstance for which they are unprepared lets us get a good look at them, and Daine ultimately shines here as a result. She does get yet another new power, which I initially found annoying, but it lead to the greatest final battle Tamora Pierce has ever written: Daine leading an army of dinosaur skeletons against an imperial palace.

Daine, along with Numair, Alanna, Duke Gareth, and many other important officials, sail to Carthak as part of a peace delegation. There she meets Kaddar, the charming nephew of the infamous Emperor Mage, Ozorne, who is responsible for the all the chaos brewing in Tortall. However, the longer Daine stays in Carthak, the more she realizes Ozorne doesn't want peace. He wants destruction. And he won't let anyone stand in his way.

If you want to read this book, I'd recommend starting it on a day when you have lots of time and nothing to do. I could not put this down. I tried, several times, but somehow, the book just wouldn't leave my hand. It had a good beginning, and intriguing middle, and a fast-paced, high-energy, page-turning ending. It show more was an incredible adventure. After the previous book in this series, Wolf-Speaker, turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, I was very pleased to see it was just a temporary dry spell that ended quickly. The ending of Emperor Mage more than made up for the lackluster ending of Wolf-Speaker. It was breathtaking and so emotional. I finished this book and immediately, I wanted to go right back to the beginning and read it again.

I cannot wait to read the last book of this quartet. I'm excited to see how all the events (and one particular mortal to immortal transformation) turn out in the end. I loved Kaddar and his willingness to take a step back and really think about whether everything he has been brought up thinking as normal (such as human slavery) is really right and moral. I hope he plays a part in book four because I would love to see how his character develops. All in all, a perfect book!

5 stars! show less

In her third adventure, wild mage Daine accompanies a delegation to Carthak where new powers and a kingdom-threatening crisis await. While her friends attempt to broker a peace treaty, Daine must balance appeasing a power-mad emperor who's been cursed by his gods and her frightening new necromantic powers gifted by the Graveyard Hag. Although a pawn in the power-struggles of men and gods, Daine valiantly struggles through with the help of human and animal friends and finds herself part of the liberation of the Carthaki people. The believability of our heroine continues as her naiveté and youth occasionally temper her powerful wild magic. The well-beloved characters retain their distinctive dialogue and personalities while Pierce show more continues to flesh out their histories and potential. Pride, egotism, anger and fear riddle the plot and characters, ratcheting the tension in the story up to gripping levels. The plot remains internally consistent and despite the series format of Pierce’s work, her plot lines never become overly predictable or stale. Common themes such as loyalty, love, responsibility, and power intermix in the award-winning tale of Tortall. One of the best books in the Immortal quartet. show less

Okay, my review is going to be a bit slanted. You see I am hooked on this author. So take what I'm about to write with a couple grains of salt. This is a wonderful quick moving story that draws you in as you interpret Daine's (the main character) adventures drawing on your own past experiences as a youth. I expected her to do what she did as the story went along. Usually that is a drawback when I read, but here is the thing: Daine does things with a flair that I never had. That keeps the reading interesting! Tamora Pierce has created characters that truly have personalities and remind readers of real people. But you probably already know that since this is book 3 in the series of 4.