Trickster's Choice

About Trickster's Choice

Trickster's Choice is the first volume of Tamora Pierce's Daughter of the Lioness duology, following Alianne—the teenage daughter of Alanna the Lioness and George Cooper—who is captured by slavers and sold into service on the Copper Isles, a colonial island chain in the grip of violent political change. The Isles are occupied by the Luarin—light-skinned nobles who have held power for generations by suppressing the darker-skinned Raka indigenous population. Aly finds herself in the household of a Raka noblewoman whose daughters may be the prophesied queens who will restore Raka rule. Hidden identity is Trickster's Choice's central operating principle. Aly is not who her captors think she is; the daughters she protects are not what the Luarin power structure believes them to be; and the trickster god Kyprioth, who has his own agenda and sees Aly as his instrument, is not what he appears either. Pierce constructs a novel in which every character is playing a role and the question is which roles are real. The political intrigue is the series' densest and most sophisticated—this is a novel explicitly about colonialism, resistance, and the mechanics of revolution. Pierce does not simplify: the Luarin are not uniformly villainous, the Raka cause has internal tensions, and Aly must navigate loyalties and strategies that resist easy moral organization. Revenge is present in the Raka people's desire to reclaim what was taken, but Pierce renders it as politics rather than simple vengeance. Trickster's Choice is Pierce at her most politically mature, drawing on the spy craft Aly inherited from a family of nobles and thieves. It is more sophisticated than the Alanna or Kel books and rewards a reader ready for genuine moral complexity in young adult fantasy.

Tropes & Themes