Tempests and Slaughter

Title: Tempests and Slaughter (Numair Chronicles #1)
Author: Tamora Pierce

Initial Thoughts: I felt like I had come home.

This is likely just me because she is one of my favorite authors and I've been reading her works for so long, but in the middle of reading, I realized that, even though I had never read this story before and it was set in Carthak rather than in Tortall, everything was just so familiar. The feel of the characters, the imagined setting, everything. This is really weird and probably only other hardcore bookworms could even understand this, but as I was reading, I was picturing everything in my head. I get a general idea of a place and that infuses everything I read in that setting. I probably couldn't tell you exact details because I don't actually have any, just a general sense of things. It's like a ghost or afterimage of something, the idea of it without any details. That's how I picture my worlds. Some I can give a very slight description (Wheel of Time is bright, colorful, busy and bustling, full of life and adventure and magic; Sword of Truth is natural, actually rather empty of life, but where there is life, it's on a large scale, so it's either empty flatlands or capital cities, all in shades of brown and green and just little hints of magic; etc.). Tortall is busy cities, knights, castles, mages, the smell of road dust and taverns. As I was reading, I realized it smelled familiar (in any way that an imagined scent that I wasn't even consciously imagining could smell) and it was like I was home. It smelled and felt like Tortall. To explain how much that means, I first picked up Wild Magic over 13 years ago after we had just moved to a new state (the one I'm living in now and have lived in for over half my life). The copy I had got sold at a yard sale (it was actually my sister's), but I never forgot it. A few years down the road I came across it at the library and found out that there were more books in the series, both before and after it. Since then I have reread all her books but the newest multiple times and her books are one of only two author's whose books I've listened to as audiobooks. I never get tired of rereading her works and I always look forward to anything new by her. So yeah, reading this new book by her was like returning to a favorite place with my oldest and longest friends and discovering something new about it.

Even though he's just a child and he goes by a different name, it is so easy to see that this is Numair. He's still struggling and growing, still becoming who he will be, but it's him. Conversing with crocodile gods and raising sunbirds, no wonder he's so good with Daine. It's really interesting also to see Ozorne and Varice when they were all young and inseparable. I don't think I'll be reading Emperor Mage the same way again. The book is just a lot of fun and epicness wrapped together, such is Pierce's style. I really enjoyed it, meeting and remeeting the characters you know so much later in life and getting their background stories. (I really like background stories.)

Rating: 5 In all honesty, with it being just the beginning book for the series and not as much happening as I'm sure it will later on, it should probably actually be a 4, but that sense of familiarity bumped it up to a 5.