This is Day 2 in Old Favorites Week, and my job is still taking over my life. (No, I do not work for the IRS.) Our second entry sort of follows upon the first, in that it’s also about a stubborn, impossibly-colored female swordswoman, but this book is not necessarily for YAs. Mercedes Lackey has written approximately two zillion books set on her world called Velgarth, generally in a country called Valdemar. This one falls in between the Arrows and Winds series.

Kerowyn is sixteen or seventeen when her sister-in-law is kidnapped from a wedding banquet. Everyone else in the place is frozen by the violence of the attack, or possibly dead — Kerowyn’s brother is somewhat useless, anyway — so guess who goes to rescue her. Kero stops by her grandmother (a sorceress)’s house, and her grandmother gifts her with a magic sword that helps women in need. This sword will take over Kero’s body and let her fight like she’d been trained when, as a matter of fact, she was just stubborn. As it goes, Kero rescues the sister-in-law, and someone writes a song about it, called “Kerowyn’s Ride.” (The song actually exists, by the way.) Kero gradually realizes that she isn’t happy going back to being her brother’s chatelaine, and decides to go live with her grandmother and her grandmother’s sworn sibling, who happens to be an expert swordswoman. Thus begins the second part of the book, wherein Kero gets trained. After that she joins a mercenary company and eventually gets caught up in a war.

Those who have read the book will most likely realize that I skimmed about 360 pages in one sentence. Some of those are even my favorite sections of the book, but they can easily be summed up. By the Sword definitely has problems — perhaps not with pacing, but if you’ve read more than one or two Mercedes Lackey books, you’ll recognize her pattern. She usually starts the book one of two ways: with a character off escaped somewhere mooning about how much her life sucks, or with a character in a busy, messy situation, from which she escapes and then goes off to moon about how much her life sucks. This book is no exception. Luckily, at the time, I hadn’t read quite so many of her works, and the book worked for me.

I’m also not entirely sure if the book would make sense if you hadn’t read about five books that come before it. Kero’s grandmother is Kethry, and her grandmother’s sworn sibling is Tarma. The first Kethry-and-Tarma story showed up in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress III. (Considering that volume XXII just came out, that was a while ago.) There ended up being two whole novels about them, The Oathbound and Oathbreakers, as well as a volume of short stories (Oathblood). The end of this volume follows almost immediately after the third Arrows book, Arrow’s Fall. Elements of both worlds are very important in Kero’s book, so although it’s a standalone book, there’s an awful lot of backstory.

Almost everyone in the book is a stereotype. I say that without rancor, because at age 11, I probably didn’t realize it. We have the spoiled third prince, the useless females, the hardened warrior females, the evil men who kidnap people . . . However, I kid you not — I spent several years wanting to name a future daughter ‘Kerowyn’. (Don’t worry. I got over it.) Kero’s another one of those stubborn, feisty, kick-a** females who, now, have turned into a bit of a stereotype, but I wanted to be her when I grew up. I wanted to take control of my life, become a hero, and still get the guy at the end. I didn’t want to be the prize — oh, how excited was I when Jasmine snapped, “I am not a prize to be won!” in Disney’s Aladdin. Kerowyn is sort of a grown-up Alanna — it’s practically heresy for me to say that, but she has a lot of the same feel. So although this book has nearly 500 pages, I read it so often as a sixth through eighth-grader that the edges of the pages are discolored. It’s definitely a more adult book than Alanna: The First Adventure — there’s sex (casual sex, even) and more violence, and it generally has a more mature feel. Despite its flaws, I loved this book so much, and it so well defined another era in my life, that I will give it 4.5/5 stars.