Reading Roundup: The Circle of Magic Quartet

Fan art of Sandry, Daja, Briar, and Tris, by illustrator Minuiko.

After I reread Patricia Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles last year, someone suggested that my next YA fantasy quartet reread should be Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic books. I always suspected that I hadn’t properly appreciated this series when I read it as a kid, so I’m glad I went back and discovered that it’s actually pretty great… in particular, that eerily prescient final book!

Sandry's Book by Tamora Pierce
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was a big fan of Tamora Pierce’s books growing up, but my love mainly centered around her Immortals Quartet, which I read over and over. Sandry’s Book, the first entry in Pierce's Circle of Magic Quartet, came out when I was in sixth grade—just the right age to be the target audience—but for some reason, I wasn’t super enthusiastic about it at the time. Giving it another try now, I can appreciate what Pierce was trying to do with this quiet character study, but I must admit that, even as an adult, I prefer a little more adventure in my fantasy.

Maybe the title also gives the wrong idea of what to expect: Sandry’s Book doesn’t just focus on its title character. Instead, it tells the stories of four children who have unusual magical gifts, as they begin to explore their powers and learn to trust one another despite their very different backgrounds. Sandry, a friendly and unpretentious girl of noble birth whose magic relates to thread and textiles, is the first character we meet, but it doesn’t really feel like her story in particular.

Although the children all have traumatic backstories, and although they experience things like bullying and prejudice even after they get to Winding Circle Temple, there’s something very comforting about this book. It’s delightful to imagine spending long summer days in a thatched cottage, eating delicious and wholesome Mediterranean-type food, guided by caring adults who teach you about meditation and working with your hands. There’s a strong whiff of late-1990s New Age spirituality here, but, you know, since I was a pre-teen in the late ‘90s, I do find that sort of thing comforting. The quiet, grounded feeling of the story is different from many YA fantasy books, where the stakes are often super-high. As the mage Niko says to the children, “[Your power] is greater than you think. There is weather, or threadcraft, or metalwork, or growing plants, everywhere in the world. People cannot live without any of these things. They may not like it, but they can live without the products of traditional magery, such as love potions and seeing the future.”

Tris's Book by Tamora Pierce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sandry's Book may have been a fairly lackluster start to the Circle of Magic Quartet, but fortunately this second book brings all of the excitement and emotion I want from Tamora Pierce’s writing. It takes place over just a few action-packed days, as the characters use their magic to help Winding Circle Temple fend off a pirate attack. And, now that she’s established the four children and their four teachers and the four different but related ways they practice magic, Pierce can start to deepen their relationships and psychology.

In the first book, Sandry and Daja gravitated toward one another—they are more emotionally stable and level-headed, so it makes sense that they’d be quick to form a closer friendship. Similarly, it makes sense that Tris and Briar should become best friends, as they start to do here—and it also makes sense that this won’t happen as smoothly as Sandry and Daja’s friendship did. Because Tris and Briar are wary and guarded and prickly: Briar’s name references thorns, and Tris’s hair crackles with lightning when she gets angry! But I really loved all of their interactions and their slow-growing trust and fondness for one another; if Briar and Tris were a few years older, I would even wonder if all their teasing and banter wasn’t set-up for a romance.

Still, as we are constantly reminded, these characters are just kids, and they have to face some pretty harrowing challenges. Poor Tris, who starts off this book as the child who is least familiar with violence and death, by the end of it learns that her awesome weather-controlling powers make her the child who is most capable of inflicting violence on a wide scale. I appreciate that, while the overarching theme of this series is the power of love and friendship, Pierce still acknowledges that anger and revenge can be powerful forces too. Winding Circle may be the first place Tris has ever felt welcomed and loved, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy for her to let go of her anger or tame the raging storm within her.

Daja's Book by Tamora Pierce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve lived on the West Coast for most of my life, but “wildfire season” really only became a thing in the last decade or so. After a few years of bad fires, I started to hear people say that this was our own fault, the consequence of years of mismanagement: fires are supposed to rip through forests every decade or two, killing saplings and underbrush but burning fast enough to spare the mature trees. But for nearly a century, we’d suppressed every fire, and now they were burning slower, hotter, and more viciously than ever.

This argument sounded oddly familiar to me, and now I realize why: it’s because I’d read Daja’s Book as a preteen, and its thoughts on wildfire management had stuck with me.

Daja’s magical powers relate to fire and metal-working, and in this installment of the Circle of Magic Quartet, she and her friends visit a drought-stricken region of forested mountains that sounds very much like some of the fire-prone landscapes I love in Oregon and California. Alongside the dramatic wildfire action, there is a satisfying emotional arc for Daja, as she struggles with questions of heritage and identity. Daja was born a Trader, a member of an ethno-cultural group reminiscent of our world’s Romani people, but was officially exiled from Trader culture when she was the sole survivor of a shipwreck (Traders interpret this as a sign of bad luck rather than good luck). Coming into contact with Traders for the first time since being cast out brings up complicated feelings for Daja, and even though she is a pretty mature and stoic kid, there's a lot she needs to work through.

Really, my only complaint is about the name of the main Trader character here: “Polyam.” Look, I have nothing against alternative sexualities, and I think it’s great that in later Emelan books, Tamora Pierce makes clear that many of these beloved characters are queer or non-monogamous or asexual. But, like I said, I live in California, and it’s impossible for me to see a character named “Polyam” and not think it’s a reference to polyamory, even though the character’s arc has absolutely nothing to do with romance or sexuality.

Briar's Book by Tamora Pierce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As a kid, I read the first three books of the Circle of Magic Quartet but didn’t find them super compelling, which means I didn’t ever read Briar’s Book before now. Which raises the fascinating question: if I had read this book circa the turn of the millennium, how many times would I have thought back to it in the last two years?

Because this is a story about living through a pandemic, y’all.

And even though it takes place in a world where magic is real and the technology level is late-medieval, it feels eerily accurate to what we’ve all recently experienced.

The book initially seems like it will be about young plant-mage Briar and his tutor Rosethorn caring for dying patients in the city of Summersea. But after one of Rosethorn’s colleagues invents a magical diagnostic oil and they can prove they aren’t afflicted with “blue pox,” they receive permission to leave quarantine and return home to Winding Circle Temple. That just ratchets up the tension, though: the goal is no longer to control the outbreak but to find a cure, and the temple mages go about this task in a methodical and very scientific way. It definitely made me think of the race for scientists to roll out COVID-19 diagnostic kits and then roll out a successful vaccine as soon as possible.

Once again, Tamora Pierce knows how to create suspenseful, heartstring-tugging situations and lovable characters. Briar is wonderful: a former street rat who talks tough but has a fiercely loving heart. I also appreciate that the Circle of Magic books aren’t about noble heroes versus evil villains, but about hard-working artisan-mages versus natural disasters and systemic problems. The blue pox isn’t some kind of biological warfare unleashed by an evil wizard; it turns out to be an unfortunate magical accident, a “lab leak” if you will.

Still, there's something especially frightening about a pandemic, more frightening than the earthquake and pirate attack and wildfire that the children faced in the previous three novels. As Rosethorn says in perhaps the book’s most prescient passage, “You know why I hate plagues? […] Most disasters are fast, and big. You can see everyone else’s life got overturned when yours did. Houses are smashed, livestock’s dead. But plagues isolate people. They shut themselves inside while disease takes a life at a time, day after day. It adds up. Whole cities break under the load of what was lost. People stop trusting each other, because you don’t know who’s sick.”