A book that changed my life {written by Lucy}

Alanna: The First Adventure, by Tamora Pierce

I picked it up at the Nelson Public Library one day, I must have been about 11 or 12. Took it home, lay on my bed (I still remember the bed, the bedside light attached to the headboard) and read it straight through. I think I ate dinner in a haze, I wanted to be in that world, not in my own anymore. That night I lay in bed and read it again, twice in one day. I was hooked. Tamora Pierce instantly went to the top of my favourite authors list.

Then I discovered Alanna was just one of a series (can you imagine my joy?!). I immediately ordered the whole set from the old Blackmore's store and set off on a fantasy adventure I still enjoy atleast once a year.

A few months later my family and I went overseas, taking only four books each. Naturally I chose this series as the books that would accompany me on our open-ended adventure. Sadly, my original copy of Alanna suffered a fate worse than death involving raw sewerage in a campervan in Vancouver, setting off a several-months long mission to replace it. Every bookshop in every town and city we went through had to be searched for an elusive copy. My Father finally found a replacement copy at a huge barnlike bookshop somewhere in the American South. I think it may have been Arkansas. We eventually settled in Montreal, where I became a regular patron of the wonderful Babar books and purchased many of Pierce's other titles.

I credit Alanna, along with Maurice Gee's incomparable Half Men of O trilogy for setting my on a path of reading and loving fantasy fiction. Without her I wouldn't have found Terry Pratchett, Margaret Mahy, Sheryl Jordan, George R.R Martin, Tolkein and so many other brilliant fantasy authors.

I own every one of Pierce's books, but Alanna and the three sequels hold a very special place in my heart.