Okay, maybe not everything, but just about everything. Tris is my absolute favourite, as hard as it is to pick a favourite main character. She is sharp and kind, and so crackling with power that she has to be a damn adult all the time and DOES IT WITH FLARE. There are some lines of hers that just killed me with the awesome."If I have a catch a man to get a husband, then I don't want one."..."Bad names are just farts with consonants."These are from memory, so they're not exact. But still awesome.This book takes the formula and samey-ness from the others and just snorts while doing it the right way. When Tris finds her student, yes, he does not believe he has magic, and she doesn't believe he didn't already know. BUT. This is because he's around twenty--the age when people with magic are usually ready to become certified mages. Of course, she doesn't think about Lark, but she is soon reminded.Anyway, he's a glassblower named Keth. When he is discovered, he accidentally makes a glass dragon. It is one of the few magical mascot animals in any book ever that I actually like. I seriously want one now. One thing you can count on Tamora Pierce for is writing animals accurately and without constantly forgetting them or shoving them out of the narrative.Everyone also behaves pretty logically and responsibly. Because Tris put the fear of Tris into Keth, he does what she told him to and goes to... I forget what it's called, the place where mages register and get teachers. The mages there realise that since he was hit by lightning, his ambient glass magic saved him, but now it's inextricably linked with lightning magic. He's already a journeyman in his craft, so he doesn't need a glass mage teacher, but one for lightning.Tris is an infinitely better teacher than any of the others. She also has a rather more difficult task than they did--her one is an adult who often won't listen because she is "just a child." She doesn't have anything like the others' difficulty with discipline or even commanding respect, though. She also adjusts more easily to what her student needs, and spends almost no time trying to get out of it. Once she commits to teach him, she never thinks of backing out.All this responsibility and matronly power just made me giddy. It's just icing on the cake that Tris has red hair in which she keeps LIGHTNING. It's her mage kit. She keeps lightning, wind, tides, and such in her braids. I love it. I wonder if it was a joke about witches controlling the weather with their hair. Probably.There's a plot of course, but I honestly could have done without it. Not because it was unnecessary or I didn't like it--it's just that I had enough with just Tris teaching Keth. It was like someone gave me a gyro and a cup of tea, and then said there would be cake. I don't need the cake, thank you. This is already lovely.There is a serial killer called the Ghost, very akin to Jack the Ripper--only targeting women who are (unfairly) seen as no better than prostitutes in the Tharios equivalent to Whitechapel. The murders are less gory, of course--strangulations. But still. A quite nice little girl is orphaned, and it starts to affect trade. The body count is very high, and we're spared a lot of the devastation.Which may not have been a good idea, actually. This part of the plot may seem to drag for some people, and I don't really blame them. Keth accidentally makes a little glass globe that shows one of the Ghost's victims who hadn't been found yet. At first, this gets him arrested, but he is mercifully cleared, thanks to Niko.Once he is cleared, though, he determines to make another globe, and another, hoping that it will help lead them to the killer. I understand this, up to a point. The biggest problem with it is... why does this even? It's such a huge hole. Why does the globe do that? I know that being able to make a scrying object that shows the vision to anyone who sees it is probably a BIG DEAL, but why does his magic do that? Also, Niko always talks about how scrying magic can be nearly impossible because of information overload and zero context. So why did he accidentally come up with something so incredibly relevant--and even more confusing, how the heck was he able to repeat the results?And don't say a wizard did it, because come on.My other issue, which had to do with the mystery (mostly), was the fact that Tris never sleeps through I think the whole book. She is similarly obsessed with finding the killer and hopes to do it by spying with her breezes while walking around the killer's hunting grounds, and by trying to scry with the wind. The latter being something which Niko tells her repeatedly is deadly dangerous. It literally does almost kill her at least once. To make things worse, she is constantly telling Keth to rest when he needs to, and then she just doesn't. Sometimes she doesn't even stay up to a purpose. She just reads a book about scrying with wind. I don't know, I just didn't get it, and it rankled after a while.All my issues with the serial killer mystery don't matter though, because I didn't actually want the cake anyway.
Despite all my caterwauling over the formulaic nature of this series, I've really enjoyed the last three books. This one is probably tied for my favorite with the second one. That one had that sweet ass battle where Briar goes to town all over the bad guy's house with his super magical plant powers, and this one had Tris being grouchy and getting a tiny glass dragon for a pet. Plus I really liked the way that T. Pierce dealt with issues of culture and religion and class in this one. Such a socially conscious writer is our Tamora Pierce.Tris, like the other three Circle members, takes on a student. She discovers him by accident as she's exploring the city where she and her mentor, Niko, are staying while he's at a conference. He is an adult ambient mage whose powers went unnoticed until he was struck by lightning months back. The lightning strike disabled him and he had to work really hard to recover. It also wrecked his ability to work in his trade as a glass blower. The lightning merged with his already powerful glass magic to form something new and scary. I liked seeing fourteen year old Tris deal with her older student, Keth, who is wary of her and treats her more like a child than she deserves. It's his wild, uncontrolled magic that accidentally creates a living glass dragon, who Tris names Chime. Chime is adorable. She eats glass-making materials, and poops and vomits and breathes fire into beautiful glass coils and balls and natural sculpted flames. She is tinkly and likes to comb her little glass paws in people's hair to soothe them. I seriously love her.All of this happens while a series of murders terrorize the lowest caste of people in the city, and Tris and her new student become wrapped up in it when the lead investigator (also a mage) discovers Keth can create glass balls that seem to predict where and when the next murder will occur. If only Keth can get a handle on his new powers in time to stop things from escalating to horrible levels. (Spoiler: He can't.)At times, I did feel I was being emotionally manipulated by a couple of things that happened, which seemed designed solely to make me feel bad and sad about what was happening, but overall, this was a great way to close out the second Emelan series.Give me a glass dragon. GIVE IT TO MEEEEEE.
What do You think about Shatterglass (2006)?
I think this is a 4.5 too. Tris is so great. So so great. I love that we see her struggle and fail and succeed in regards to containing her temper; it plays very real to me. Niko is my favorite teacher to read about, although he didn't quite measure up here to his scenes in the original Circle quartet. Dema was fascinating, and Tris's relationship with Keth was just so so great. This book remedies one of my big complaints about the other three in this quartet, which is that we don't get up close enough to the new kinds of magic. In Shatterglass, we actually do see a lot of Keth's lightning-and-glass magic. This is maybe because it's in Tris's character to really study up on it and to work with Keth very closely, especially as his magic is so similar to hers. Whatever the reason, though, I appreciated it a LOT. Tharios was fascinating though infuriating, and I liked the way the status quo was changing by the end, but only to a fairly realistic degree. Again, frustrating but essentially good writing.Anyway, I really really liked this one.
—Shoshana
This is the last of this series. We have come to Tris. She and Niko seem to be in a place with much bigger culture shock than anybody else's travels. The extreme emphasis on cleanliness and the ranks or classes that the people are divided into is disturbing. There are parallels with serfdom but the more frightening parallels. You can see our own modern divisions between various classes. This place makes Tris firey and righteous. Tris's student is also more difficult than the students of her "siblings" because Keth is a grown man. He was already well on his way to a career so this new magic is even more of a disruption to him, but their struggles in education seem small relative to what occurs around them. The murders of the lower rank citizens and how they are handled by the city make the inequalities all the more angering. I think it is part of why I was slower this one, I had to stop because I wanted to shake people. This book makes me realize that Tris has possibly grown more than any of the others. She was the roughest, with the most power and the most anger. She had the farthest to come. She deals with a grown person and a young person both so well. She is so dangerous. I still have a hard time relating to her but I enjoyed what I saw of her more so in this novel. I've always been curious about Niko's history and this novel just made it worse because there are less familiar people around so you expect more time with him, like you got with Rosethorn in Street Magic but you don't actually get that much more time with him. The ending was not really at all what I expected, which is a good thing. Serial killers are always interesting to me. I honestly have no idea what the next book, starting the next series, will bring.Original Review on my Website
—Stephanie Jobe
This is the final book in the Circle Opens quartet. It follows Tris and her teacher Niko on their adventures out in the world. Like the other three books in the series Tris discovers and untrained ambient mage and has to take him under her wing. Unlike the other books, he's had a little magical training (meditation mostly) and he shares an aspect of her powers - lightening. Over the course of the book he and Tris help police to hunt down a serial killer in the city. I was glad to see a return to the student being integral to the mystery in the book. That was a problem with book three - the students felt like they weren't even part of the story. I enjoyed watching Tris try to teach a student with a temper and willfulness to match her. The mystery was a bit lacking, as there was no way to guess who the killer was before the reveal. But as this isn't a true mystery novel, I'm willing to let that slide. I enjoyed this book while reading it and felt that it wrapped up the quartet very nicely.
—Kari Chapman
