Shatterglass

Tamora Pierce

Tris has mastered her lightning and weather magic as far as she is able. She has always been responsible about magic, and seeing someone else mess up a ‘spell’ makes her mad! With a murderer on the loose, Tris must help her new student grasp his slippery power to create lighting balls.

Tris is possibly the least likely one of the original four that you would imagine having a student. Not because she isn’t grown up enough, but because her talents are mostly useful for violent things. It’s fitting that her student is an adult, one that has come into his power by accident.

A complaint I have about this quartet is that although Pierce has explicitly stated that she has chosen this point in time to catch up with Tris, Sandry, Briar and Daja, I find it strange that they end up with students all together in their 14th year. It is sequential as well – the book order is the order that they get students.

The ending of this book is as good as you would expect from the other books. Perhaps unlike the other books, Tris is set to move on, and she is taking her adult student with her in a way. It all works out in the end! It is not a satisfactory quartet ending, but then, each book of the quartet basically stands alone anyway so it doesn’t matter in my opinion.

I have tagged this book perhaps a little bit unexpectedly with ‘dragons’. Really it should just be ‘dragon’, singular. If you can see from my book cover image there, the thing resting on Tris’s shoulder is a beautiful glass dragon. Maybe that’s why I like this book so much! Dragons have a special place in my heart.

You don’t need to have read the other three books in the quartet to enjoy this one, because the mentions of the other three are brief. I’d recommend this book again for children and teens. The deaths and grief that accompanies them is ugly, but not too vivid.