The woman who rides like a man

This book would be threadbare until almost the end if all the white savior stuff was removed, there isn't enough otherwise to carry it.

As a sequel, continues Alanna's journey by showing her first year after getting her shield, one which is spent primarily with a Bazhir tribe and eventually become their shaman. It wraps up Jon and Alanna's relationship, rather spectacularly though late in the book. It also continues Jon's meeting with the governor of Persepolis in the first book, leading into Jon becoming the new Voice of the Tribes. There's a new storyline related to this particular tribe's shaman and three teenagers with the Gift who have been cut off from most of their community, within this storyline several things are introduced and resolved. It specifically leaves some things for the final book in the quartet, including but not limited to whatever magic Thom is working on, and someone working to destabilize George's position as King of the Rogue.

Alanna is the main character, and I think the sections following her are narrated similarly to the previous two books. It's hard to tell, because this has so many colonialist and racist asides where she makes bad guesses about what's going on with the Bazhir, particularly with the women of the tribe. She repeatedly brings up her frustration about the women wearing face veils, but doesn't express any curiosity into why they're wearing them, or their cultural significance as anything other than signaling someone has begun menstruating. 

By way of telling Kara and Kourrem her backstory, Alanna briefly summarizes the events of the first two books in a pretty complete manner, supplemented by a few additional explanations as fit the plot. A lot of the story could make sense to someone who hadn't read the first two books, but the final third or so is focused on storylines begun earlier. Overall, this would be a frustrating and probably confusing read for someone who used this as their entry point into the series. 

The main storyline is a composite of white savior tropes, formed from several different variations on the Bazhir needing or wanting someone from Tortall to help them change. The Bazhir are a people organized into many tribes, unified by the Voice of the Tribes. Alanna becomes a warrior adopted into one of the tribes via trial by combat, and her presence is the catalyst for this tribe in particular to become more willing for their women to participate in traditionally male parts of their society. The current Voice informs Alanna that Jon, the current Prince and future King of Tortall, must become the next Voice of the Tribes so that the tribes stop fighting against Tortall and become fully part of the kingdom. The part that makes both of these storylines troubling is that the Bazhir are clearly meant to be a fictional version of real-world desert dwelling peoples, and therefore major aspects of the plot are inextricable from white savior tropes and colonialist stereotypes. The ones related to Alanna’s defiance of separate standards for men and women are at least in keeping with the theme of Alanna bending gender norms (which is the backbone of the series). But it's definitely an issue for the current Voice to request one of the conquerors to become the new keeper of his people’s hearts and history. 

Alanna as the tribe’s savior coming in from the outside perhaps reaches its height when she ends up becoming the new shaman and taking three youngsters as apprentices. They had been rejected by the tribe for having the Gift, though I don’t see any good explanation for why they would be rejected as supposedly demon-possessed when the mere existence of the tribe’s original shaman means that the Bazhir know of magic and how to recognize it. My most lenient interpretation is that the shaman was greedy and didn’t want to be replaced, and so refused to acknowledge the magic of anyone who could possibly succeed him, which is certainly in keeping with his characterization. But the tribe’s refusal to do anything to fix the situation, literally waiting for the Balance to shift, means that explicitly in the narrative it only got better because Alanna arrived, which comes right back to her as a white savior.

The storylines I appreciate begin when Miles and Jon visit the Bazhir tribe to see Alanna and have Jon train as the next Voice. Through this time spent together outside of the palace and with Alanna’s identity no longer a secret, Alanna and Jonathan’s romance comes to a head when he asks her to marry him and then assumes she’s already said yes. The other follows George for a while after Alanna leaves the Bazhir to resume traveling.

The Ishak storyline bothered me when I read this as a kid, and now most of the book is frustrating. It has some important moments, but not enough to make it worth recommending.

This is clearly the book about Alanna accepting her magic.

Watching Alanna learn who she is throughout the series is half the fun, because she struggles with accepting all the portions of herself and of who she wants to be quite a bit. She needs to learn to be more flexible as she grows up, and this book helps her along that path.

She spends the book with the Bazhir. Here, in a tribe that ends up adopting her, she ends up fighting against a microcosm of the culture she tried to escape from when going on adventures after earning her shield (and admitting she was female) at the end of the last book.

They are not huge fans of the idea of a warrior woman, and she spends a lot of time trying to explain why there is nothing terribly different about her.

"'You are a terrifying creature,' the Voice told her solemnly. 'You do not take your place in your father's tent, letting men make your decisions. You ride as a man, you fight as a man, and you think as a man-'
'I think as a human being,' she retorted hotly. 'Men don't think any differently from women - they just make more noise about being able to.'"

She ends up adopting two girls who are willing to take a place among men, but in their own ways, which was lovely. They don't jump into the idea of rejecting everything about their culture or about their femininity; they find ways of adapting those portions of themselves into positions that still work with what they have to do. I liked that Alanna was willing to admit that her initial knee-jerk reaction of rejecting all femininity was silly and that she helped to mentor these girls into becoming women who could have the best of both worlds and help their tribe at the same time.

From her time with the Bazhir, Alanna learns the value of her magic. She has been fighting that idea for a long time, fighting the concept of it as being a cheat. She accepted her gift of healing several books ago at this point, but the rest of what she can do has been sitting idle, and she finally gets to exercise it in this book. Teaching other people (and other women) about how to use magic helps her to finally recapture that part of herself.

Jon also gets to do a little bit of growing up in this book, though most of his is negative rather than positive. This is probably his lowest point in the series, and for good reason. Alanna ends up kind of pissed at him, and that is also for good reason. But George is always there to have her back when Jon is acting like a fool, and it is nice to see both of them again and to watch Alanna sort out her feelings for them as an adult and an acknowledged woman.

This is a transition book into the endgame, and it is an enjoyable ride, but not my favorite in the series. It is very focused on character development and on what characters need to learn to make it to and then through the endgame, and thus the pace feels kind of slow. It's a good read, though, and a visit with Alanna is always enjoyable.