Beka Cooper Trilogy (Terrier, Mastiff, Bloodhound). Tamora Pierce.

Pierce, Tamora. Terrier. Random House, 2006.
Pierce, Tamora. Mastiff. Random House, 2009.
Pierce, Tamora. Bloodhound. Random House, 2011.


I loved the first two books and liked most of the third one. I'll get the negatives out of the way first: I felt that the final book wrapped up way too fast, neatly tucking in all bits and bobs...except also glossing over one or two things that I wouldn't have expected to be glossed over. Also--though I'm not going to get into spoilers--I found the final "trick" that saved the day to be oddly...juvenile, or maybe just too silly, I guess? I didn't have a problem with it on its own, really, but I felt it didn't fit with the tone of the rest of the trilogy. (I admit that I feel guilty saying this, and I can't help wondering if it's me somehow; I haven't found this to be an issue in any of her other books, and I've read quite a few. It's still bugging me, though, so here it is.)

Now that that's out of the way...

If you're into reading the entire "world" of a give author, this is a fun one. She does a great job of looping things in so that when you read another series set in the same world, you realize midway through that a character being repeatedly referenced is actually someone from the last series, or an event a character in Book X is obsessing over is actually an event that occurred in Book Z.

You know when you start reading a book and the narrator is annoying...and maybe s/he's supposed to be annoying, right, for Serious Plot Reasons or whatever, but that doesn't stop him or her from being annoying and making you want to throw the book across the room? I find that Pierce's narrators are the absolute opposite of that. Even when a narrator is, say, being pigheaded about something, the character herself isn't annoying or dull. This is huge for me, as my primary interest in fiction is usually characters and relationships between characters.

The format is fun (journal entries), because of what gets written down and what gets "left out." It adds another layer of characterization of the narrator, which of course is always going to make me happy.

For the most part I think things are relatively predictable in the way of so many "basically cheerful" books written for younger people, and that's actually something I appreciate. I like happy endings and knowing that my main characters are unlikely to suddenly get slaughtered. There were a few twists in this trilogy, though--particularly toward the end--that surprised me...yet without sending me running for my safe space. So that was cool.

I don't make extensive notes in most of the fiction I read, so these reviews are just going to be general impressions, and most of them will be pretty short.