The
Library
PIERCE, MEREDITH ANN
BOOKS ON MY SHELF...
The Darkangel Trilogy: How Aeriel's quest to avenge her friend's murder becomes a quest to save her world; and how a fantasy can turn out to be science fiction in the end. At one time available in a bound compilation volume, these are the individual novels:
The Darkangel
A Gathering of Gargoyles
The Pearl of the Soul of the WorldThe Firebringer Trilogy: The Vale Unicorns' phrophesied fight to reclaim their homeland, and what role the prince's son, Aljan, plays in the struggle. Released as the following novels:
The Woman Who Loved Reindeer: The tale of a village outcast and her changeling lover, and how they led their people to a new land.
Where the Wild Geese Go: A children's picture book. The beautifully illustrated story of Trusjka's winter journey to discover the secret of her grandmother's illness (and possibly of becoming a less impossible child).
MOST OF PIERCE'S BOOKS are out of print, a tragedy that ought to be mourned by readers everywhere. Thankfully, Amazon is very good at procuring hard-to-find titles, and I've been able to collect them all.
They are well worth it. Pierce writes with a lyrical style appropriate to myths, legends, and a particular type of well-told faery tale. Her heros are ordinary people, perhaps with certain quiet gifts, but never a Hercules or Xena. They could be you or me, caught up in events beyond our control. As if that weren't enough, Pierce has this completely unfair knack of describing any emotion's physical counterparts, such that the reader can't help but feel the lumps in the throat, the hollow heartaches, the rising joys, as if they were his/her own. Her endings always leave me in tears no matter how often I reread them, making them hard to read aloud. Which is a shame, because the language of these books is best enjoyed with the ears.
If you hate "sappy" books, prefer muscle-bound or gun-toting action figures, can't stand anything but modern American English, or have no patience for the art of storytelling (as opposed to the craft of story writing)... you probably shouldn't bother. And you have my sympathies.
If I had to complain about one thing, it is perhaps that her main characters just aren't very quick on the uptake. I'm pretty good at suspending disbelief, but every friend to whom I've lent my copies of The Darkangel Trilogy comes back with, "If only Aeriel wasn't so dense! I figured it out chapters and chapters ago..." (My husband likes to say that if she were a D&D character, she'd have an Intelligence of 5. Which only goes to show a hero doesn't have to be a genius to capture your heart, I suppose.)
(Not to be confused with a certain Meredith Pierce who writes books about home finances, or Tamara Pierce who wrote the Song of the Lioness series -- also a good read but very much written on a junior high level.)
The individual books of The Darkangel Trilogy were semi-recently re-released in paperback with gorgeous new covers, possibly to celebrate the third book's first paperback publication. (I still prefer the old paperback covers, which had a certain surreal Michael Parkes quality that tended to sum up the whole story much better; too bad they didn't just do a new cover for the third book by that artist.) That was 1998; I hope that the new release gains the author enough popularity to drag the rest of her beautiful work out of obscurity and back into bookstores and libraries everywhere.
table of
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