Book Review: First Test (Tortall 2023 Reread)

book review, tortall reread

“You can laugh and say I’m a silly girl—but when I see anyone big pick on someone small, well, there’s going to be a fight.”

Kel

We finally get to my absolute favorite quartet of the entire Tortall series: The Protector of the Small books. They are the best.

This is the pinnacle moment of Tamora Pierce’s career, right here, where she writes about a girl who is not chosen by the gods nor blessed with super special magic. Kel’s just a kid who wants to be a knight so that she has the skills and the training to stop bad shit from happening to others, and at ten years old she has more honor in her little pinkie than anyone else with a shield.

I wanted to be Kel so badly when I was a kid. Kel was one of several reasons I joined the Marine Corps. Was I ever like her? No. Not at all. But she remains an inspiration to me, even at thirty-seven, even when some of the things she (and I, as a younger person) admire are a bit extreme (I have slid more to Myles’ point of view with regards to the whole concept of warrior stoicism and chivalry bits). Rereading this, I am boggled that Pierce was able to make Kel so relatable without being obnoxiously righteous. It’s such a hard thing to do.

And now to on to the review. As always, spoilers abound.

The Plot, in a Nutshell

The book kicks off with Alanna meeting with Jon and Lord Wyldon (the trainer of pages) about the concept of a girl openly trying for her shield for the first time in living memory. Alanna is elated. She’s going to help this kid. She’s going to be the mentor she always wanted. And then the bubble is burst with Wyldon, who’s got a point but is also a misogynistic dick about it. Alanna cannot go anywhere near this child—if this kid wants to be taken seriously, it must be very clear that she has had no magical help or cheating. And, Wyldon is like, if you insist on a girl, *I* insist that she’s put on a probationary year or I walk out. Because Wyldon has Jon by the figurative balls, Jon agrees. Alanna is understandably furious.

Forward north, to Kel, who has learned of her acceptance into the page program and also of the stipulation that she is to be on probation. She has three brothers, all of whom are already knights. She’s like, this is wrong that I am being treated differently right off the bat, let me think about it. She goes for a walk and has determined that she is going to become a warrior another way because this way is not right, and stumbles upon a group of boys attempting to drown a sack full of kittens. Kel rescues the kittens, but the sack is plucked by a spidren. Kel sounds the alarm and attacks with a makeshift sling, but before the local warriors kill the spidren it kills several kittens. It’s this moment that makes her decide she is going to become a knight, because she wants the fastest way to learn how to defend those who can’t protect themselves.

Right off the bat, Kel arrives at the palace and meets resistance. Wyldon reads her the riot act (about having sex—she is ten) and she finds that her room has been ransacked. Salma, the head housekeeper, is immediately on Kel’s side and gets things cleaned up. Kel looks about the room and is like, huh, you hate me for being a girl? Well I won’t let you forget. She decides that from here on out, she’s going to wear a dress to dinner.

She also meets her yearmates, and is sponsored by Nealan/Neal, who is himself a bit of a different sort of page. At sixteen, Neal has dropped out of college/healing school to earn his knighthood, and is one of the oldest pages in living memory. The other boys, especially a third-year page called Joren, are absolutely against having her there.

The first day of training comes around. Kel was told by her oldest brother not to stand out…and she immediately does. She spent the last six years on the Yamani Islands training with the palace ladies, and has a whole host of military training that is…a lot different than what Tortallan boys receive. The first physical training of the day is hand-to-hand fighting, taught by two Shang Warriors, the Wildcat Eda Bell and the Horse Hakuin Seastone (a Yamani!). Later during staff training she gets blocked off and bullied by one of the boys, and she’s like, I know I’m not supposed to show off but dammit I’m not going to be bullied. She beats the boy, and gets called out because she’s not doing the assigned exercises and she’s doing the wrong moves. Kel, however, has been trained not with the staff, but with the glaive, a polearm weapon. At the end of the day, she received an anonymous gift—a belt knife and sheath. She has no clue who it is, but receives other thoughtful gifts throughout the year. Someone wants her to succeed.

Kel and the other first year pages get horses—not ponies. The only two left are a dud and a meanie. Peachblossom is a nasty gelding who has been mistreated and ruined for knight’s work and possibly any work, and Kel is about to take the dud and deal with it when Stefan the horsemaster is like, “Well Peachblossom is too much for you, but unfortunately everyone must earn their keep and if he’s not picked by someone then I’m going to have to send him to be a carthorse…but he’s not suited for that either.” Of course Kel takes Peachblossom. He is too big of a horse for her, and has a lot of personality.

Neal invites Kel to study with him and Prince Roald. Kel agrees, and a little study group is born.

A few weeks later, Kel stumbles into Joren bullying Merric, another first-year. Kel’s oldest brother had also told her of a tradition called earning your way, where older pages and squires make first-years do stupid tasks, but this is beyond that. Merric is getting slapped and hit. Kel…runs. This is the first time she has ever backed down from a fight, and she does it to save herself, because she believes that if she fights, she’ll be kicked out.

Later, the pages begin lance-training—another change since Alanna’s time. Kel’s lance is horrifically heavy, and she has a bad moment at the lance that is witnessed by Lord Roaul and men of the King’s Own. Roaul is like, “Wyldon that horse is too big for her,” and Wyldon is like, “The probationer chose that for herself.”

Kel has some bad moments, feeling defeated. The teachers realize something is wrong, but only Myles asks if she is okay. Kel collects herself. If she’s going to fix her issues with the lance, she needs to get stronger. She needs to talk to a person like her. She turns to the Shang Wildcat, one of her teachers and a woman warrior, for strengthening exercises. And Kel starts extra training on her own, in addition to all the shit she already does.

Then Kel’s lance breaks, and she realizes that she has been given a weighted lance. None of other boys train with one. Kel is furious. And she is done. She prepares to fight.

She finds Joren and company bullying Merric again, and she picks a fight. They are thirteen. She is ten. Merric runs. Kel gets the crap beaten out of her, but she holds her own, and she doesn’t rat anyone out when she’s sent before Wyldon.

Kel continues to fight, because Joren and company turn their sights on Seaver. Neal is worried sick about her and confronts her. During these months, their study group had grown to Faleron, Cleon, Seaver and Merric. Kel justifies her stance, and continues on to the fight. Neal joins her. The next night, everyone but the prince and Cleon join her. The bullying stops, and Kel and Neal decide to move the study group into the library in an act of reclamation.

That summer, they go on a trip into the woods. Wyldon has discovered Kel’s fear of heights, and sends her up into a tree to map the surrounding area. Kel is defeated but determined. She obeys orders, even when she is literally terrified and gets bullied even harder because of it.

A spidren nest has invaded a village and taken prisoners. Along with the King’s Own, Kel and the pages are taken to fight them. The first-years are assigned to guard the rear. During the fight, they are attacked from the rear and Kel takes charge after both Seaver and Neal falter. She saves the day, and is teased when she throws up later after the baby spidrens are burned in the nest.

She’s convinced that she’s going to be told that she can’t return, but she is allowed to stay in the end. On the day she learns she can stay, she received another gift from her mysterious benefactor with a note that says, “Goddess bless, lady page.”

Shifting the Goalpost

This book is mainly a stereotypical school story in that the plot takes the main character through a year of school. There’s growing up and friendship and the trials and tribulations of childhood drama. Where this book differs is that Kel is in training to be a knight, and she’s the one girl surrounded by boys. She’s the first girl. Well, the openly first girl. Since Alanna and Thayet arrived, the fighting world has opened to women—with the Queen’s Riders and the Queen’s Ladies. But despite these new avenues to war, the traditional paths to warriordom—the army, the navy, the King’s Own—have always been barred to women. And knighthood, that pinnacle of warriorhood, has been technically open to girls, but no one has tried out (chalk that up to conservative noble families). Until Kel. The spotlight is on her.

And, like many people with the utter misfortune to be both the first and a minority, Kel faces a lot of shifting goalposts.

The page school has changed significantly since Alanna’s time. Under Wyldon it’s become a lot stricter and a lot more intense. Much of this has to do with Wyldon’s warrior stoicism, but other things have to do with the way the world has changed. Tortall has become a lot more dangerous in the past ten years—and especially more dangerous since the appearance of the immortals. No where is safe. Despite Carthak being defeated the year prior, there are still the Scanrans looming on the horizon, and there are still pirates and immortals.

But more intense also comes with downsides. There are more injuries, for one. And there are more…intense beliefs. The blind eye of fighting in Alanna’s time has morphed into a custom known as earning your way (more on this later), which translates to sanctioned hazing that of course turns into bullying.

The main goalpost Kel has shifted is the probationary year. Unlike all of the other first-years, her place isn’t guaranteed for the next year (barring some major fuck-up, all the male first-years will move to the second). If Kel fails anything, she’s out. Period.

And Wyldon makes it very clear that he believes she—and all other women—don’t belong in this bastion of masculinity. Knighthood is for men.

Wyldon sets the stage for Kel to be treated differently, and when he isn’t outright ignoring her existence, he’s over-criticizing and forcing her to do things—like climb trees when she’s petrified of heights—in order to get her to quit on her own.

This set-up, of forcing Kel to be in a probationary status, gets Kel to thinking about unfair rules and unjust laws. She knows it is wrong that she is on probation and no one else is. She looks to Jon as King, and thinks that if he allowed this, what else does he allow. Kel’s introduction to unjust traditions and laws—which really began in her time in the Yamani Islands—really makes her settle back and dig in more firmly in her beliefs of right and wrong and how a knight is supposed to behave.

Wyldon, Chivalry and Warrior Stoics

Wyldon is an interesting and complicated character who gets a lot of attention, and not just because he is the page trainer. He is the main male figure in Kel’s life. Or should I say, the main male warrior in Kel’s life (her father is amazing, but he is a diplomat; it’s her mom who is the warrior in their family). Despite being the one who ensured she was in probationary status, he’s also known for being the dictionary definition of chivalry and bravery, and he operates under a warrior stoicism that is extreme even under most terms.

“Anything new gives my lord of Cavall a nosebleed.”

Neal

I always envision Wyldon as something like Master Chief Urgayle from GI Jane. He’s hot, he’s a hero, he’s going to tell you that pain is your friend and he’s going to train you into an absolute beast of a warrior. He adores dogs. He is a warrior who talks the talk and walks the walk. He has a very strict moral code and a rigid definition of what is Right. He’s also dead-set against women fighting and an absolute conservative, but we can’t have everything can we. This is a joke, obviously. Wyldon is a surprisingly complicated man and not immune to change, as we’ll see.

Kel already has had a lot of introduction to warrior stoics with the Yamanis. It makes sense that she rationalizes a lot of the things Wyldon does, because on paper they are meant to make her better. It’s what she’s grown up with. Pain makes you stronger. Hardship makes you tougher. Wyldon is also her superior officer, and both the Yamanis and Tortallans are big on hierarchy.

But where Wyldon’s stoicism tilts off the rails is the emphasis on hardness.

In the Marine Corps (and the rest of the military, but I only know the Marine Corps way), there is this thing called the Whole Warrior Concept, which is part of the Three Block War theory, which mostly deals with urban warfare but translates here. On one block you might be providing humanitarian relief, on another you could be doing stabilization work, and on a third you could be engaged in combat. As a modern warrior, you have to learn to shift seamlessly into these different modes.

Wyldon mainly teaches the combat method, and despite telling his students they must know the other ways, he doesn’t teach compassion. He doesn’t teach humanitarianism. He teaches war and chivalry, and expects that to cover it.

Which works great for some of the students, but it allows the ones with a bit of an entitlement complex to morph into something else entirely (see: Joren). It allows, too, for traditions like earn your way to transform into hazing and bullying (again: Joren). Earning your way means that “I had to do this and therefore so must you,” perpetuating a cycle of violence that, as Kel notes, doesn’t do shit for making you into an empathetic or chivalrous human. How you train and act as a student is how you are going to become as a warrior or a knight.

Combining this whole brewing shitshow is the idea that you don’t rat out your fellow pages. Tradition and honor dictate that if you fight, you tell the page trainer that you fell down. Tradition and honor also dictate that you handle shit on your own, because that is how knights traditionally deal with issues: on their own. But the world is changing and what is wrong in the past remains wrong. Wyldon’s turning a blind eye to the fighting because that is how boys are boys is not right—and it makes him miss something seriously amiss with his students because he believes it is Kel that is the source of the increase in fighting.

Kel, however, is just the catalyst that makes what’s been bubbling under the surface come to light. I think that Kel’s presence in general was going to make this all surface, because the sheer fact that a girl is allowed mocks the very essence of a knight’s existence (something somthing chivalry, something something misogyny).

But instead of just having things finally come to light and get worse, Kel is going to stop all this shit, because that is who Kel is. While Alanna also faced her bully on her own (with help in learning how to fight from George), Alanna never really looked into stopping the weird traditions in her own training cycle. A lot of that was because Alanna was hiding the fact she was a girl. Kel isn’t. And Kel is also Kel and determined to protect. Kel isn’t going to just stop the bullying on herself. She’s going to end this tradition for everyone because it’s wrong.

There are several moderately subtle critiques on stoicism in this book. Kel is all about stoicism, because that’s what she was raised in and she does really admire Wyldon in many ways. But the critiques come from Myles, a sedentary knight who isn’t a true warrior, and Neal, who is just as much an oddity as Kel is. It won’t be until Squire that we see a true foil to all this toxic stoic nonsense.

I could go on and on about this, but let’s just have a moment to shout out Neal. Kel is the catalyst. Kel sees what is wrong, and her moral compass and sense of duty and honor compel her to stop it—but her own honor and sense of isolation means that she’s not going to ask for help. When Neal confronts her for being foolhardy and Kel tells him off, Neal joins her in the fight. And with Neal as Kel’s stalwort supporter, the others follow. This trend, of Kel seeing the wrong and haring off to fix it, and Neal following after and the others joining in, is going to be a trend in the rest of the series.

Kel and Duty

I’ve touched on this a lot already, but Kel is such a fantastic protagonist.

She’s literally ten years old, but has the emotional maturity of someone so much older. Despite the odds stacked against her—and there are many—she has a lot of things going for her.

She has endured so much already. Her intense dislike of bullies stems from being bullied at a young age—at three, by an older brother who hung her by her feet from a tower. I mean, I’d be terrified of heights as well if that happened to me. She has also already experienced a fish out of water phase as the child of diplomats on the Yamani Islands. She arrived to a hostile situation, endured rounds of teasing and ostracizing that only changed when her mom literally rescued priceless cultural heirlooms from pirates. She’s also done years of hard ass weapons’ training, and has learned to keep her mouth shut and not complain from the most Stoic of Stoics. She has miles of reserve drilled into her, which is both good and bad.

Despite all of this, Kel has a sense of duty to do right to others beneath her. To protect those weaker than her, no matter who or what they are. Instead of turning into a bully when she has the power, she turns around to break the cycle of violence. Unfortunately, that breaking the cycle also happens to be within the cycle itself, which means violence is broken by more violence and with just herself—until her friends join her.

She arrives to the palace knowing how to fight, knowing how to comport herself and not show emotion/frustration, and she arrives with the adaptability of a diplomat’s kid. The down side is that while she knows how to fight, it’s all just ever-so-slightly different. They use different bows. They use staffs instead of glaives. Hand-to-hand is different.

But Kel has to be good. She cannot fail, because she knows the spotlight is on her. She can’t be the worst, and while she doesn’t seem to want to the best and highlight herself, her drive and dedication means that she slowly transforms into the best (more on that in Page), which forces Wyldon to adapt to her and for the other pages to follow (again, more on that in Page). She’s blazing the trail for all other lady pages to follow. At ten.

And, another thing I love is that Kel is such a little nerd. She loves schoolwork, especially math. It’s so cute.

Allies and Friends

I’ve said this before in literally all of my other reviews of the Tortall series, but Pierce has proven time and time again that friends are the answer. Although here it’s a little different. Where before the bullies were generally on their own, here the bullies have friends—Joren is joined by his cronies. They are a group like Kel, and in turn they come to represent two different ideologies: progress versus the status quo.

Right away, Kel proves to have allies. Salma the head housekeeper is very firmly on Kel’s side. I love that this older commoner woman tells Kel as delicately as possible (with regards to their stations, as many pages are steeped in knighthood and nobility and class hierarchy) that she’s there if Kel needs a confidential ear or a shoulder. Kel doesn’t take her up on it, unfortunately, but Salma is a quiet ally.

It also becomes clear that the palace servants are Kel’s allies, too. Gower and Stefan like her. And the servant who waits on Wyldon gives her a wink. And it’s very clear that this is because Kel treats them like they are human and appreciates their worth, where a lot of other nobles take them for granted. In Stefan’s case, it’s because Kel takes Peachblossom and truly cares for him.

Kel also has animal allies—like so many of Pierce’s protagonists (this is a feature, not a bug). While I love the sparrows Kel befriends, Peachblossom and Kel are the best pairing in the entire book. Peachblossom is the grumpiest most unloveable gelding in the history of the world. He is a curmudgeon and he and Kel are the mostly unlikely and most fantastic pairing, because they are the same in so many ways. Peachblossom will never change, and neither will Kel. Kel admits, in a later book, that Peachblossom is her other half, the half that is angry and able to express that anger.

As for other human allies, right off the bat is Neal. I’ve already talked a lot about Neal, but he is such a door opener for Kel. He knows the palace and everyone in it, his heritage is impeccable (his dad is Duke Baird) and he’s older than the other pages so doesn’t get a lot of grief from them. He also sees a bit more clearly in some ways than they do, as he’s had training in other disciplines. It’s Neal’s friendship that introduces Kel to Prince Roald, and Neal who starts their study group. And Neal who adds more people to the group.

Over time, Kel wins over her fellow first-years (for the most part). It’s not easy, and it doesn’t help that Kel is interrupting and possibly shaming them for fighting their bullies. But as Kel tells them, she’s not doing it for them.

And, of course, Kel has her mysterious benefactor. Let’s be honest, we all know who this person is. But their gifts and support are really what I think push Kel forward and buoy her. Someone out there wants her to succeed, and it’s someone who is intimately familiar with the weapons’ training and what a girl training to be a knight needs. I think in her deepest thoughts Kel knows who it is, but she doesn’t want to think or voice it in case she’s deeply disappointed.

Wrapping Up

I could talk forever about this book, but really what the Protector of the Small boils down to is duty. The duty we owe to the people in our care, and the duty we owe to ourselves and each other. The duty we owe to those who cannot protect themselves. The duty we owe to stopping systems of oppression.

And the courage it takes to do the right thing, especially when the right thing goes against the grain of tradition and cultural norms.

It should come as no surprise that every single book in this quartet gets five stars.

Final Rating: 🌲🌲🌲🌲🌲/5

Previously in my 2023 Tortall Reread Series:

Published by laurel • the suspected bibliophile

Published

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