Treasure at the Heart of the Tanglewood by Meredith Ann Pierce

[meganbmoore]

Hannah has always lived in the Tanglewood, a place where nothing ever changes, in service to her master, a magician who requires her to make a draught for him from the flowers that grow in her hair. Though she reaches out to the peasants who come to her for aid and tells them she doesn’t need their offerings, her approaches are always fearfully rejected. Hannah doesn’t begin to understand why this is until one day she realizes that though she herself remains unchanged, an elderly woman was once a young girl who came to her for aid, many years ago.

Meanwhile, many knights have come to the Tanglewood to fight a giant golden boar who lives there, and win his treasure. All the knights die and one day, she speaks to one of the knights, who tells her that he, and the others, are on a quest to reclaim their queen’s treasure from the boar. Later she finds him wounded and tends to the knight, who she names Foxkith after learning he has no memories, neglecting her master in the process Eventually, she defends Foxkith against her master, causing her to be ejected from her home, beginning a quest to learn both Foxkith’s past, and her own origins, constantly changing as she goes.

I found this book to be a lot like Patricia McKillip’s The Book of Atrix Wolfe, in terms of my response to it: it kept me reading and has everything for me to love it, and I vastly enjoyed it as I was reading, but I didn’t retain a lot of it. It is a good book, though, and I think I’ll hunt down more of Pierce’s books. Also, if you read it, pay a lot of attention to Hannah’s hair.