Product Description

WHAT MAKES A warrior?
This gutsy collection of 15 original short stories compiled by bestselling author Tamora Pierce and anthologist-author Josepha Sherman answers this question with thought, heart, a lot of variety, and an occasional wink.
Contributors include some of today’s most-beloved fantasy and sciencefiction authors: Tamora Pierce, Holly Black, Pamela Service, Margaret Mahy, Bruce Holland Rogers, Mike Resnick, Brent Hartinger, and more.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #828876 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-11
• Released on: 2005-10-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From School Library Journal
Grade 6 Up–What does it take to be a warrior? Fifteen different fantasy writers offer answers to this question in this well-written and carefully arranged collection of new short stories by experienced writers. Their examples include both males and females fighting physically, mentally, and spiritually; in times ranging from prehistory to World War II; and in distinct settings including Central America, a Russian shtetl, the Near East, Australia, the Sudan, India, the African savannah, and an Irish convent, as well as fantasy worlds. The protagonists are mostly teenagers, some driven by the nature of their world to rise to heroism, others seeking out adventure and potential glory. It is the nature of short-story collections to be uneven, but these selections are almost all strong, with quickly sketched but memorable characters and well-drawn settings. Readers will particularly welcome Pierce's own contribution featuring Kylaia from Lioness Rampant (S & S, 2003) in her familiar Tortall universe. The other contributors include Bruce Rogers, S. M. and Jan Stirling, Janis Ian, Holly Black, Pamela Service, Esther Friesner, India Edghill, Mike Resnick, Laura Anne Gilman, Margaret Mahy, Doranna Durgin, Rosemary Edghill, Lesley McBain, and Brett Hartinger. This timely and appealing anthology will surely help swell the ranks of teenage fantasy readers.–Kathleen Isaacs, Towson University, MD
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Gr. 7-10. "In this anthology are those who have trained to be warriors and have chosen to turn aside from that path, as well as those who have never trained for it, yet picked up weapons to defend those they loved from some looming threat." Fantasy author Pierce introduces this eclectic mix of 15 stories depicting young people fighting for what they believe--among them, Helen of Troy, who tells an alternate version of her rescue, and Maire, a teenager in an Irish Catholic convent school who invokes great magic to help a Jewish girl escape death during World War II. The contributors will be familiar to fantasy readers: Esther Friesner, Pamela Service, Holly Black, and Pierce herself, to name a few. Grammy winner Janis Ian, who "began writing prose two years ago," also supplies a tale. Story quality is mixed, but genre readers will enjoy the selections, and they'll get some information about their favorite writer in the author profile that rounds out each selection. Cindy Welch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Tamora Pierce is the author of more than twenty books, including the bestselling and award-winning Trickster's Choice and Trickster's Queen. She lives in New York City.

Josepha Sherman is a novelist, folklorist, and storyteller. She lives in New York City. The author lives in New York, NY.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Customer Reviews

Entertaining, but lacking in certain aspects
This one is more of a 3 1/2 for me, but I rounded it up to 4 because I'm just too picky when it comes to the excitement of a story.

This book is basically a collection of stories about warriors in some way, shape, or form. Some stories stand out as thoroughly captivating in some way or another--i.e., the dark 'Heartless', the action-packed intrigue story 'Devil Wind', and the funny 'The Boy Who Cried "Dragon!"' Others were boring or with a not-so-great plot--i.e., 'Serpent's Rock' and 'Lioness'(<--this would have been good if it had been written by a different, or better, author). Fans of Tamora Pierce who leap at this book, prepare to be at least a bit disappointed; only one story is written by Her Fantasy Highness herself, and even that one 'Student of Ostriches' was surely not her best.

I enjoyed this book for the first couple stories, and then after a while I started realizing that this book was getting mediocre fast. I barely read the last two stories--whether that was a mistake, I don't know, but sincerely doubt. 'Young Warriors' is for fantasy lovers who have long zipped through Tamora's new book, 'The Will of the Empress', as well as all the other new fantasy reads, and are in desperate need of a good book of magic and strength. However, I would recommend getting this one at the library, depending on how high your endurance level is and how much you love fantasy.

Wonderful Ideas, Execution at times lacking
"Young Warriors" is, on the whole, an enjoyable collection. It contains fifteen stories about young people and children written by authors of greatly varying fame and experience. Some of them are wonderful- I particularly enjoyed the first story in the collection, "The Gift of Rain Mountain" and Pierce's own story- and some of them leave much to be desired. The collection is interesting in that it seeks to bring together stories about very different topics- from mermaids to Roman invaders. However, this also means that the volume does not flow particularly well for one who wishes to read more than one story at a sitting. Further, some of the stories are quite juvenille, while others are aimed at a teenage reader. This, along with the divergent writing styles of the authors, makes the collection a bit choppy.

The essays which introduce and conclude the collection added nothing to my reading. Pierce's introduction is little more than a naming of the "warrior" in each story and a statement about how we can define a warrior in any number of ways, and the concluding essay said nothing more than that the concept of a warrior is still relevant to American society as well as other societies in our own time. These things are such as to be known by any intelligent reader who picks up the volume. Further, the contest to "be a young warrior" in the back of the text struck me as tawdry. Thus, although I did enjoy many of the stores, I found the collection itself somewhat lacking.

Awesome!
These stories are very good in different ways. The thing the reader needs to keep in mind is that the stories aren't supposed to flow or fit together-that's the whole point of the book. So yes, if you try to read them in a row it will seem weird, since every story has a different feel to it. I loved some of the stories, particularly "Eli and the Dybbuk" and Pierce's "Student of Ostriches". I can't guarentee anyone liking it, but if you like that genre and keep an open mind you should like some of the stories, at least. I love it!