Tamora Pierce Books

Tamora Pierce published Alanna: The First Adventure in 1983, and it is fair to say a measurable percentage of every woman writing fantasy today read it at eleven and never recovered. The Song of the Lioness quartet, finished with Lioness Rampant in 1988, follows Alanna of Trebond, who swaps places with her twin brother and disguises herself as a boy to train for knighthood in the kingdom of Tortall. Sword training, magic lessons, a lion rampant on a shield, and a heroine who wins her shield and then has to figure out what the rest of her life looks like: the template feels familiar now precisely because Pierce built it first.

What is quietly radical, and the reason she belongs on a romantasy site, is that Pierce never pretended romance and adventure were separate categories. Alanna has three love interests across the quartet, including Prince Jonathan and George Cooper, the thief-king of the capital's underworld, and she chooses between them as a grown woman based on what she actually wants from her life. The books were frank about sex, contraception, and desire at a time when almost no one writing for teenagers would touch any of it. Generations of readers got their first love triangle here, and George Cooper remains an all-time entry in the charming-rogue category that romantasy still leans on today.

Tortall kept growing for decades. The Immortals quartet, starting with Wild Magic, follows Daine, whose wild magic connects her to animals, and features a student-teacher romance with the mage Numair that readers argued about when it was published and argue about louder now. Protector of the Small, often cited as her best work, gives us Keladry of Mindelan, the first girl to train openly for knighthood, and trades Alanna's disguise plot for a slower grind against everyday sexism; it won Pierce lasting critical respect and, along with Song of the Lioness, the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime contribution to young adult literature. The Trickster's duology follows Alanna's daughter Aly into spy work, the Beka Cooper trilogy goes back two centuries for street-cop fantasy, and Tempests and Slaughter (2018) finally told Numair's origin story. A separate universe, the Circle of Magic books, runs on craft-magic and found family and has its own equally devoted following.

On our 0-5 spice scale, Pierce is a 1. Sex exists, clearly and matter-of-factly, but happens off page. What she offers instead is something modern romantasy sometimes forgets: romances that develop over years of shared work, and heroines whose stories do not end at the wedding.

Pierce matters to this audience the way foundations matter to houses. Sarah J. Maas has named her as an influence, and you can draw a straight line from Alanna to every knife-carrying heroine currently topping the bestseller lists. The honest caveats: the early books are short, the prose is functional rather than beautiful, some of the 1980s plotting creaks, and the Daine-Numair age gap has aged badly for many readers. Meanwhile the 2025 graphic novel adaptation of Alanna, gorgeously illustrated by Vita Ayala and Sam Beck, plus recent deluxe hardcover editions of the quartet, prove a new generation is still finding her books and falling just as hard.

Start with Alanna: The First Adventure for the historical experience, or Protector of the Small's First Test if you want her at full strength. Reading order within each quartet matters; order between quartets mostly does not, though Song of the Lioness first gives everything after it more resonance. These are fast reads, and the whole Tortall shelf can carry you through a season. Consider it homework in the best possible sense: this is where your favorite genre learned to fight.