Get The Will Of The Empress (The Circle Reforged, #1) Edited By Tamora Pierce Contained In Copy

know, I know here she goes again with another Tamora Pierce, I can't help it, I just love her characters and world building to the moon and back!

This one was really difficult for me to read.
Tris, Briar, Sandry, and Daja have been separated for years, Naturally, they've grown apart and unaccustomed to sharing their thoughts with each other but seeing them shut the others out so completely is heart wrenching, I very much enjoyed experiencing the court customs in Namorn, even if I didn't particularly

enjoy every member of the court, It made my blood boil to watch certain people intentionally drive wedges between the four, Seeing the adults that these unique children have grown in to is amazing and I loved being part of their story, Oh so highly recommended. This book ispages of hurtling towards a stunningly abrupt end, The book is a slow build there isn't a terrible lot happening, and you find yourself switching between POVs too much to really engage with any one character.
There are no heavily plotted moments to provide momentum and development to the story Daja's storyline is especially static she's essentially written out of the book towards the end because her queer romance wasn't good enough for any real screentime Which I suppose could've been a publisher mandate, but it did serve only to emphasize my feelings the Daja is easily the most underserved the marginalized one of the four.


The Will of the Empress had a lot of problems, There's some awesome victimblaming on Sandry's part, wherein she only rescinds her grossass statement that a woman who lets her husband beat her because she had no pride when she finds out this woman was forced to marry against her will.
This kind of thinking implies that women who are anything less than physically forced into an abusive relationships are somehow more culpable for the behaviors of their shitty partners and that is an awful, damaging viewpoint that people hold in real life.
I get that Sandry's viewpoint isn't necessarily the the author's, but I feel like this perspective was presented without much discussion

All that aside, the motivations of the characters were just rather baffling.
Sandry in particular was offkilter, I get that Pierce was trying to show her growing out of the remainder of her childish petulance, but the problem was that, while Sandry has always been eminently capable of acting like a child, she has never seem particularly attached to any of the trappings of nobility.
The fact that she had such mulish, awful stubbornness towards retaining her Namornese properties felt rather out of character, Similarly, much of the tension between the four seemed manufactured on the author's part to draw out the conflict in the story, Also, as I mentioned above, the actual resolution came so quickly it was unsatisfying, Suddenly the characters gave a summary of their respective Circle Opens books except Briar and all is well!!

Also, it almost felt like Briar received preferential treatment.
He was the only character who actually had something happen to him in the four years between the end of his book and the start of this one.
It was jarring to have Briar make references to stuff that had never happened on screen when everyone else only regurgitated information that we had already received,

The Will of the Empress is an unwieldy mess of a book with uneven, inconsistent characterization and sloppy emotional resolutions, I think I need to give these characters a break after a disappointment like this, I'll be holding off on Melting Stones and Battle Magic, Obviously going into this book afresh without any prior history of the characters is troublesome, For those who have read prior volumes, you will be thrown off by allusions to events in our Circle's lives that we are not familiar with that have not been written yet but will be but this book is wonderful without.
Essentially four young people have separated and become adults with new secrets and come together again with the intention of remaining friends and must feel their way through their own barriers and discomfort to a stronger friendship.
They do this in an unfamiliar land where Sandry has been summoned as a responsible landowner and member of the nobility to wait on the Empress' pleasure a character very familiar to any who have read of Queen Elizabeth I's court in England.
The characters are well drawn and the intrigues well played, New characters are introduced, a man driven crazy by an onslaught of uncontrollable magic, and a woman caught in a marriage of misery, that the Circle binds with them in their usual way of protection and care.
So some are not caught off guard, sexual blossoming occurs with homosexuality present in a positive manner, There is a epic showdown of magic and power and overall the book ends on a very positive and pleasurable note, I am heavily against sexual immorality in books and can't condone it, Briar is distracted, Daja goes weird, and Sandry tries to find love, but at least Tris stays sane, Nothing like a book for company, Im new to the world of The Circle of Magic and I will most certainly say that I will be reading more after having my introduction through this book! I found myself eager to know the backstories of characters Ive already come to love.


Ive read here in several reviews that it was not enjoyed that the characters had drifted and were changed, This is simply realistic. They will change more I would venture to guess, Psychologically speaking ones brain is not even finished developing until youre aboutor so, Tris, Daja, Briar and Sandry are only really beginning to get to know who they are, Theyre onlyafterall.

What I didnt like, This was no fault of the author really, I was new to this world and therefore the first nearly half of the book went rather slow for me while I was getting to know the characters and the universe, so I couldnt quite give it a fullstars.


What I liked: The rep, POC and non straight characters, And the discussion of womens rights as seen in the custom of bride kidnapping, I love Tamoras ability to create characters to fall in love with and her world building is on point, Am tempted to rate this a little higher than I would otherwise to make up for the kneejerk homosexualityruinseverything reviews,

I think Pierce suffers from too many narrators, Or at least, something is going on in this book right now that makes her characters, usually rich if not super complex, strangely flat,

A lot has happened since the last time we saw Sandry/Daja/Briar/Tris, and this book is not really going to walk us through it, instead leaving us with bitter versions of the previous characters and telling us that we'll just have to trust that each of their experiences has been traumatic.
Sandry, pretty cheerful and doing her best last time we saw her, now feels incredibly bitter about being left behind and has mentally retconned it so that she's felt that way for the whole four years Briar has PTSD from a war we haven't actually read about and won't see outside of a few dramatic flashbacks Daja feels like she no longer has a home, which seems like a bit of a silly reason for her to close off from all the others and Tris has grown so antisocial from spending all her time around arrogant adults that she doesn't feel like sharing any of her thoughts or motivations with the rest of the group.
These single bitter points will define each character for a surprisingly long first part of the book, emphasized with grumpy inner monologues, as none of them do much other than fight for a number of chapters, while not actually going over their feelings with enough depth for us to actually empathize with their feelings.


If you liked any of the other characters you've read about in the last eight novels, you'll be lucky if they get a bit part in this book.
The four mages all end up traveling to Namorn, an area we haven't seen before, a court that could be cool and political but turns out to just be vapidly pretty on the outside and plainly evil on the inside.
No, really, we know that there are sinister motives behind the court because Pierce switches narrators so we can hear about it firsthand, Because of this, there's very little suspense, or any real reason to keep reading other than the momentum your eyes have picked up from the chapters of setup.


The book brings up issues that young adults have begun to think about, but they're not addressed as thoroughly as they should be if they're to be interesting topics.
Take sex. The fourmaincharacter setup doesn't allow for the same Let'sthinkaboutitandhere'smyconclusion approach that some of Pierce's other books have, but while the characters will disagree and bicker about it, there isn't any real discussion of the different values the characters have, or the way that PTSD, sexual orientation, and body image issues are affecting the conversation.


In the end, the characters learn that they should have been communicating with each other all along, a trustyourfriends moral that usually takes up a chapter or two in one of the Tortall books, so that the main character can then move on to further character development and more interesting things.
No longer children, but accomplished mages in their late teens, Sandry and her foster siblings travel to Namorn and encounter a world they certainly weren't prepared for especially since their circle was broken.
Travel and separate experiences have distanced them emotionally from each other, and they don't always learn to work together before a threat strikes, . .

The series assumes that you've been kept uptodate on the siblings' histories, Pierce doesn't spend a lot of time explaining what's been going on, and who can blame her you've had two tetrologies to read about Sandry, Tris, Daja and Briar.
By the time you've made it this far, you're invested,

sitelinkTamora Pierce does an excellent job describing the rich world of Namorn, a refreshing change from the humble temple the children grew up in and the towns they traveled to.
The siblings are treated to the highest echelons of Namornese society, largely because Sandrilene fa Toren is cousin to the Empress and the wealthiest maiden in the country.
Pierce lavishes us with vivid textual descriptions of the hidden inheritance Sandry wants to ignore and treasures that the Empress offers specially designed for each of the siblings.
Pierce's research into building up the Circle universe shows, from descriptions of homes to the histories of names and common customs, Having the book focused on Sandry, who is out of touch with her Namornese heritage, is a nice way to discreetly explain things to the reader,

The plot and pacing is good, The multiple characters and perspectives is a little daunting at first, as I usually ended up trying to track what was happening at one point in reference to another.
Pierce weaves the characters' relationships carefully, showing just where fences are broken and remended,

My only difficulty was trying to identify with the characters, Surely there are child geniuses that earned advanced degrees at fourteen or fifteen, Yet the four have not only medallions at fourteen while one normally studies into their late twenties, they are also highly successful, politically powerful and extremely wealthy even Tris, who has the potential to earn that much.
It feels like due to pure accident, they've become wildly powerful, and they feel overwhelmed with the amount they can wield, It isn't like they didn't work hard, but they're shining examples of what happens when all the right things fall in the right places, There are rare examples in which a mage with a talent falls on the wayside, such as the boy with unmagic sitelinkMagic Steps Circle Opens or Eilisa Pearldrop sitelinkBriar's Book Circle of Magic these could have easily been Briar or Tris or Daja.


Aside from that, the book itself is good, Most of the characters are substantial, with thoughts and motives behind their personalities, Crumbs of potential plot a cutoff statement here or noted observation there help set up bigger events, There's lots of rereadable value in this book, and it's a good start to the new tetrology, .