I had Tortall and Other Lands: a Collection of Tales on pre-order so that I would have it in my hot little hands the moment it dropped. I own all of Pierce’s Tortall novels in some form or another, and her Magic Circle novels, and was eagerly awaiting the short stories to fill in around the characters that I've been following for many books and years.

The stories are all good tales, but the collection itself is highly erratic in both length and depth. It goes from short stories about characters we've never met to long stories about characters who we know (and hopefully love) already. For example, we get to meet the apple tree that Numair turned into a human, halfway around the world, in a short story about intolerance from all sides. On the other hand, we also get to spend quite a long time in Nawat's head as he deals with being the father of newborn triplet half-crow babies.

For me, the best parts about the stories were Pierce's explorations of characters and motivations. My favorite character, Kitten (Skysong) the dragon, has her own story in this book, told from her point of view. She is bored bored bored BORED while on tour in Carthak, so wanders off with Spots the horse to find her own trouble. What she finds is not the usual den of thieves, but a runaway mage hidden by an even more magical secret. That story was a fun romp that focused on the emotions and motivations of a child-aged dragon with nothing to do and no one for playmates besides a too-smart horse.

The harder work as a reader was in the first few stories and the last two. Pierce created and explored a very restrictive, religious society where girls were not educated and most of the population bowed under what could be interpreted as Sharia laws. In both "Elder Brother" and "Hidden Girl", we visit this ignorant society from the point of view of free-thinking young women, and learn about the two very different choices they make for rebelling against that system. In the last two stories, Pierce moves to the current and modern day. One of them is about a girl who wants to be a runner, and how joining a clique can cost more than just individuality. The last story abandons fantasy completely in order to tell the only-slightly-fictionalized story about "breaking in" a new housemother at a halfway home for wayward girls.

As I said at the beginning, the depth of the stories changed a great deal as well. There were interesting filler stories about the plains cultures and the toughness expected from the tribes, about a merchant girl who loves mathematics, about how young dragons have coming-of-age testing as well, and about the basic silliness of trying to sacrifice a virgin to a dragon. They were all well-written and enjoyable, and none of them linked back with any strength to the main Tortall stories. With that lack of linkage, as well as the erratic length and depth of the stories, I don't think that I will keep this book because I don't expect that I will revisit it enough to warrant granting it that shelf space.

I'm glad I bought it, but I'll also be pleased to pass it on.

   -- Colleen Reed