Squire Review

Squire review: an apprenticeship in responsible power

This Squire review argues that Tamora Pierce's third Protector of the Small novel succeeds because it refuses to make advancement look like a reward bestowed on an already finished hero. Keladry of Mindelan has earned the right to become a squire, but that promotion only enlarges the field in which she can fail, learn, and be judged. The novel turns apprenticeship into its central moral form. Skill matters, courage matters, and recognition matters, yet none of them is sufficient without the harder capacity to use authority on behalf of people who possess less of it.

That emphasis distinguishes Squire from a simpler training fantasy. Kel is not waiting for a hidden power to reveal her exceptional nature. She has already survived years of scrutiny as a girl pursuing knighthood in an institution shaped by male custom, and she knows that mistakes will rarely be treated as hers alone. They can be used as evidence against every girl who might follow. Pierce makes that burden visible without reducing Kel to a symbol. She remains practical, observant, sometimes uncertain, and deeply interested in doing the work in front of her.

The result is a book about becoming legible as a leader. Kel's appointment under Lord Raoul gives her an experienced commander to learn from and places her near the daily machinery of service: travel, preparation, discipline, logistics, combat, and care for a group rather than the polishing of an individual legend. Raoul's importance lies not in delivering grand speeches but in showing how competent authority behaves. Through him, Kel sees that command is partly the art of noticing what institutions prefer not to notice.

For readers browsing fantasy reviews, that approach offers a welcome alternative to stories organized around prophecy. Kel's legitimacy is made from repeated choices. Pierce asks whether courage can remain humane once it acquires rank, and the novel's strongest answer is that real strength is demonstrated by whom a person protects when protection brings no prestige.

Why the long span works

The book follows Kel across the years of her squireship rather than compressing development into one decisive campaign. That broad span creates an episodic rhythm. Assignments, journeys, court obligations, relationships, and military dangers arrive as parts of an education whose meaning accumulates. Readers looking for one tightly bounded quest may find this structure less urgent than the earlier stages of Kel's progress. Yet the shape is not accidental. It makes growth visible as a practice rather than a revelation.

Pierce is particularly good at using repetition without making every repeated task feel identical. Kel meets variations of the same ethical problem: how to act when a hierarchy is useful but imperfect, how to distinguish loyalty from passivity, and how to protect others without imagining herself as their owner. Each encounter adds pressure to her earlier assumptions. She becomes more capable, but increased capability exposes her to more complicated forms of responsibility.

This is also why the book can move between public action and private uncertainty without splitting into two separate novels. Kel's questions about attraction and intimacy do not sit outside her pursuit of knighthood. They show another side of the same coming-of-age problem: how to recognize a desire without letting it erase judgment or work. Pierce does not present romance as the final proof that Kel has become an adult. It is an experience she must interpret, one among several claims on her attention.

The timespan further allows relationships to change through shared labor. Companions become more than fixed functions in a school story, and enemies cannot always be preserved as convenient caricatures. People are revealed through how they behave under strain, how they respond to Kel's competence, and whether they can revise what they assumed about her. The approach is less theatrically neat than a single rivalry, but it suits a novel interested in durable character.

Readers who enjoy Pierce's attention to the education of gifted young people can also consider the site's Wild Magic review. That novel begins a different heroine's path and uses a more overtly magical bond with the natural world, while Squire keeps returning to learned technique, institutional service, and the ethics of command.

Keladry's distinctive kind of heroism

Kel is compelling because Pierce does not confuse restraint with lack of feeling. Her composure is active. She observes rooms, weighs consequences, and often decides that a useful response matters more than a satisfying display of anger. In weaker hands, such steadiness could make a protagonist seem merely admirable. Here it becomes a source of tension because the reader understands how much indignation and fear Kel must organize before she can act.

Her heroism is therefore managerial in the richest sense. She pays attention to supplies, training, morale, vulnerable people, and the ways a supposedly small neglect can become a serious danger. The novel insists that these concerns belong inside heroic fantasy rather than beneath it. A dramatic rescue may be memorable, but the habits that make rescue possible are built earlier, through preparation and the refusal to treat ordinary people as scenery.

This focus sharpens the series' critique of gender without making every man either opponent or ally by category. Kel confronts prejudice, but she also learns within relationships of trust with men whose authority is real. The key question is how that authority is exercised. Pierce's institution is capable of preserving exclusion and of teaching honorable service at the same time. That tension is more persuasive than a world in which courage simply destroys every flawed structure it encounters.

Kel's example also complicates the familiar idea of the “strong female character.” Her strength is not a collection of spectacular traits. It is a pattern of attention. She notices the frightened, the dismissed, and the people a military system might classify as peripheral. Her sympathy does not make her less decisive; it improves the quality of her decisions. The novel's enduring value lies in this connection between compassion and competence.

Readers interested in a more openly rebellious treatment of bodily power and coercive authority may prefer the heroine discussed in the Graceling review. Katsa's conflict is more directly organized around escape from a ruler's control. Kel's struggle, by contrast, is to serve honorably within an institution while learning where obedience must end.

Lord Raoul and the education of a commander

Lord Raoul is an effective mentor because he expands Kel's understanding of knighthood rather than asking her to imitate him. He gives her access to a larger field of action and lets her observe how leadership depends on delegated trust. The mentorship has warmth, but its literary importance comes from method. Raoul treats Kel as someone capable of carrying responsibility, then places that responsibility in contexts where the outcome affects more than her reputation.

The relationship also protects the novel from the fantasy that a gifted student grows entirely through solitary will. Kel's discipline is her own, yet her opportunities are shaped by adults willing to recognize her fairly. Pierce is honest about that dependence. Merit cannot matter if every gatekeeper refuses to see it. Raoul's role demonstrates what institutional allyship looks like when translated into decisions rather than compliments.

At the same time, mentorship does not remove danger or uncertainty. Kel still has to decide what she believes and how far she can carry a commander's assumptions into unfamiliar situations. Good instruction creates judgment; it does not provide a script for every crisis. The novel respects this distinction, and it is one reason the later tests of Kel's leadership feel earned.

There is an appealing lack of mystification in Raoul's example. Leadership involves knowledge of people, the willingness to accept unglamorous burdens, and an awareness that rank changes the consequences of a careless choice. These lessons connect the courtly and military elements of the setting to the everyday ethics of work. They also make Squire useful for readers beyond the age range suggested by its young adult classification.

Strengths of Squire

The novel's greatest strength is its patient account of earned competence. Pierce gives Kel room to become better without pretending that improvement makes every problem simple. Physical training, observation, emotional self-command, and moral courage reinforce one another. The book values preparation, but it never suggests that preparation can abolish chance or protect everyone.

A second strength is the way large stakes grow out of concrete obligations. Warfare and public danger matter, yet the narrative repeatedly returns to specific lives rather than abstract populations. The treatment of displaced people is especially important to the book's understanding of protection. Kel does not regard vulnerable civilians as interruptions to the “real” adventure. Their safety reveals whether the ideals attached to knighthood have substance.

Third, Pierce sustains a readable balance between action and reflection. The prose is direct, favoring clarity of movement and motive over ornamental description. For some readers that will feel plain, but it serves Kel's practical intelligence. The writing directs attention toward choices, relationships, and consequences.

Finally, the book develops its world through use. Customs and offices become meaningful because Kel has to operate inside them. The reader learns what authority does, who receives it, and who pays when it fails. This functional worldbuilding may be less lush than that of more atmospheric fantasy, but it is unusually well aligned with theme.

Cautions and limitations

Squire should not be treated as a stand-alone novel. It begins after substantial character and institutional development, and the emotional weight of Kel's progress depends on knowing what her earlier advancement cost. A newcomer could follow the broad situation, but would miss the accumulated force of relationships, rivalries, and prejudice. This is a third volume that trusts the series structure.

The episodic design will also divide readers. Because several years pass, some developments receive concentrated attention while others are bridged more quickly. Anyone wanting a single, escalating quest may experience the middle as a chain of episodes. The gain is breadth: Pierce can show that maturity is assembled across different situations. The cost is a looser sense of one plot tightening toward one climax.

Readers should also expect material involving warfare, injury, bullying, gender prejudice, and danger to civilians, including displaced families. Pierce writes for a young adult audience with restraint, but she does not make service harmless. The novel's argument about protection would mean little if the people Kel wants to protect were never at risk.

Some secondary figures inevitably receive less development than the book's long span seems to promise. The story belongs firmly to Kel, and characters often come into focus according to their role in her education. Readers seeking a fully distributed ensemble may wish for more interior space around them.

For a related fantasy in which a young woman confronts a different mixture of gendered expectation and martial identity, see The Woman Who Rides Like a Man review. The comparison clarifies how Pierce revisits questions of public authority across distinct protagonists and stages of life.

Reader fit, context, and alternatives

The ideal reader for Squire already knows Kel and wants a coming-of-age story in which progress is visible through judgment. It is especially well suited to readers who enjoy training, mentorship, military organization, and ethical dilemmas grounded in daily duties. Those looking for a heroine who leads through attentiveness rather than charisma will find the book particularly satisfying.

It is a weaker fit for readers who need elaborate magic at the center of every conflict, a romance-dominant structure, or an adventure that can be entered without series context. Romance is present, but it does not displace Kel's vocational and moral development. Magic belongs to the world, yet the book's most consequential resource is trained discernment.

Within young adult reviews, Squire stands out for treating adulthood less as independence from all structures than as the ability to act responsibly within and sometimes against them. Kel does not become mature by declaring herself free of obligation. She becomes mature by understanding which obligations deserve her loyalty and which uses of authority betray the ideals they claim to serve.

As an alternative, Graceling offers faster propulsion and a more explicit conflict between exceptional power and royal coercion. Wild Magic provides a more magic-centered entry into Pierce's fiction and begins its heroine's story at an earlier point. Readers drawn specifically to women pursuing martial recognition in Pierce's work can use The Woman Who Rides Like a Man as a comparison, though it belongs to another continuous series and likewise benefits from being read in order.

Final assessment

Squire is one of those series novels whose achievement lies in development rather than reinvention. It takes the questions already attached to Kel—whether she will be accepted, whether she can endure unequal scrutiny, whether discipline can preserve kindness—and gives them a larger arena. The answers are persuasive because they are never delivered as slogans. They emerge from work, mistakes, observation, danger, and the growing number of people affected by Kel's decisions.

Pierce's central insight is that knighthood is meaningful only if it becomes service. Rank without attention is vanity; skill without responsibility is merely capacity. Kel's journey remains compelling because she learns to connect personal ambition to public obligation without losing the quiet core of herself.

The novel is not the best entry point to Protector of the Small, and its multi-year structure may feel diffuse to readers who prefer a compact quest. For its intended audience, however, it is a rewarding continuation and a serious account of young leadership. Squire earns its place in the series by making promotion the beginning of a harder education, not the end of one.