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An Interview with Laura Martin

For my thirty-ninth Dream Gardens kid lit podcast, I interviewed author Laura Martin about her favorite children’s book, the  middle grade fantasy novel  Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce, the first book of the Song of the Lioness series.

Originally published in 1983, Alanna: The First Adventure  is the first of four novels, the other three being In the Hand of the Goddess, The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, and Lioness Rampant.  Alanna is a  young girl with a gift for magic who wants nothing more than to be a knight, so she trades places with her brother, disguises herself as a boy, and travels to the palace to begin her training as a page.  There she must endure the hardships of  grueling practice and the torments of a viscous bully, and when a mysterious sickness finds its way to the castle and one of her closest friends, Prince Jonathan, she must dig deep within her magic reserves to find a way to save him. And that is just the beginning of her adventures, culminating, at least for this book, in a dangerous and eventful visit to the legendary Black City.

Laura Martin is the author of the Edge of Extinction series, including the books The Ark Plan and Code Name Flood, and the newly released middle grade novel Float. You can find Laura’s website at lauramartinbooks.com.

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