In the Hand of the Goddess

This is a novel that I enjoyed reading, though not, perhaps, as much as the first novel. One of the many reasons why is because of the fact that this text follows up an excellent little book that I liked reading. It was, at the time, a book that I thought would be perfect for middle grade students, but now, I think would work well only for YA readers. This is because that, despite it's excellent protagonist, this novel does seem a bit more out of date than the first book.

Firstly, Alanna was an excellent character, once again. She seems to earn everything she gets, and little, if anything is handed to her that I felt she did not earn in some way. This makes her, again, an excellent female lead that I loved. I also liked how she talked with her cat, which was a nice touch.

Sadly this novel quickly descends into romanceville, and never really recovers. Maybe I would not mind so much, assuming the novel was long enough to get me to like the two boys. However, with it at a sub 300 pages, this book was just too short to do that. This leaves the characterization lacking, even considering that this is the 2nd novel. The romance also leads me into a 2nd point: the age group change. Based on the 1st novel, I judged this to be appropriate for middle school students, and that may have been it's target audience in the 1980's. Here, however, the audience for me changes considerably, with the content of the 2nd novel. Here we have characters who are casually mentioned sleeping together, and mentions of other adult activity. I would not mind this, and looking from my adult perspective some 30 years later, I can certainly understand that my views would not be similar from the authors, but I still cannot show this to a middle school student. Therefore, I have to change my age target from Middle Grade to YA.

But there are some other things here that I chose to ignore in the first novel, or else were not as apparent, namely the short development of scenes, and the jumping of time. For many of the scenes in this book, those that should linger for the sake of the character and suspense are instead skipped through with all the speed of a car on the highway. For example, at one point Alanna is captured by the enemy during a war. This should be a very tense scene, allowing us to see how she handles the problems of not only being interrogated, but also her possible discovery as a woman. In a normal YA novel, this would be worth a chapter, at least. Here, however, she says some quippy lines, and someone shows up to save her with no problems in about three pages. We are then told how the war ended, instead of being shown it. This short scene development is something that was present in the first book, but I don't think I minded it because it was all about seeing Alanna grow and change. Here, however, it is starting to get extremely noticeable, as we move from location to location without a chance to breathe, metaphorically speaking.

This is compounded by another problem: the extremely fast passing of time. In this book, we are being told that weeks, seasons, and sometimes even years pass without much happening except a few things we are told about. This jumping around would not normally bother me, but with the scene problem mentioned above, it creates a disjointed sense of progression. I understand that in a medieval world there are many mundane things that have to happen to a character, but other authors have managed to convey this without the plot feeling hollow.

Then there is the villain, Duke Roger. I will say that he does get some more development here, but, with the problems mentioned above, he is not given the justice he deserves. For example, as we read, we come to find out that a girl who has been courting the Prince is in league with the Duke. This is not conveyed to us in any decent way, we are just dropped into a scene where they happen to be talking about their evil plans. It was a bit random, and in retrospect, a bit of a let down as far as a reveal is concerned.

This may have been a bit of a let down as a 2nd installment, but there is still two more books in this series, and there is still hope for this to turn out well. This book in the meantime gets a three out of five. I had fun with it, but the romance portions got in the way of the story far too often for my taste. Hopefully, the next book is better.