Pierce, Tamora. Protector of the Small: Squire

This isn't the first book in the series--this was all they had at the library--so I concede that I'm not getting the best introduction to Tamora Pierce.

At any rate, it's about a teenage girl who is also the first girl to be trained as a knight in a century. She faces various challenges and learns various lessons, which are pretty much what you would expect. My impression was of perfectly competent YA fantasy that unfortunately pushed my buttons until I was annoyed with it. The buttons:

1) For someone who's been reading Joanna Russ and Ursula LeGuin and James Tiptree since ninth grade, "Girls can do anything boys can" is about the least interesting, and most obvious, thing that can be said about sex and gender. That doesn't mean that I won't be interested in a book that's about the struggles of the only girl (page/squire/knight) in a world of men; I just want it to have some point beyond "Girls can do anything boys can." And boy, do I find myself annoyed with books where the protagonists magically adopt liberal modern western values, despite not living in a liberal modern western society, while the antagonists are prejudiced, old-fashioned bigots. Yes, okay, A Great and Terrible Beauty gave off a scent of that. But it certainly didn't reek of it like this does.

2) Must the author take a real-world society and culture and language and plunk them down in the middle of a fantasy world? Very distracting, for anyone who speaks Japanese. And does it have to be Japan, which has enough problems being stereotyped as sooo nifty and exotic? And do the Japanese people have to be from Japanese StereotypeLand, where no one ever shows a trace of emotion? And... if you really think you must do all this... can you at least get the Japanese right? Arigato goziemashita, indeed.

3) In what universe does an otherwise competent woman accept a romantic relationship that consists only of the guy kissing her and calling her annoyingly sappy names? ...Oh, right, this one. But the narrative never pauses to consider that this might be problematic. Love Interest Guy is so boring.

I think even if these buttons hadn't been pushed, "competent" is about the nicest thing I'd have to say for it; the pacing is all off, and it feels rather predictable, like it's going through the paces. It feels pushed in all different directions at once: here's a bit of romance, here's a bit of politics, here's a bit of warfare, here's a bit of training, and it doesn't ever really cohere or come together--which, granted, it what you might expect from a middle book in a series.

I'm told that this is decidedly not the best thing Tamora Pierce has written, and just from reading it I get the sense that she's capable of much better.