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Wild Magic series, by Tamora Pierce.
1 - Wild Magic
2 - Wolf-Speaker
3 - Emperor Mage
In Wild Magic, we meet the main character of this series, Daine. Her family is killed by bandits, and so she needs a job to support herself. Since she has a way with animals, she gets hired on as a horse handler.
Turns out her "way with animals" is actually a form of magic.
As usual for me, the first book was the one I enjoyed the most. We learned all about the world, met "immortals" (creatures from another world), and joined Daine in learning about her magic.
Book two, Wolf-Speaker, was really, really slow. If I hadn't been told book three was the best of the series, I would have DNF'ed it. In Wolf-Speaker Daine makes friends with a wolf pack, and together she and the rest of her forest friends uncovered a plot to kill the king and take over the realm. Daine's magic was really pushing the bounds of believability/overpowered-ness in this one.
In book three, Emperor Mage, Daine and her friends travel as ambassadors to the country behind the in-book plot in book two. Unfortunately for me, I didn't find this book to be very good. It was much better than Wolf-Speaker, but Daine was too overpowered for me to enjoy, and the book did a fake-death thing that I never like (He's dead, so dead... gotcha! No he's not!).
This series has a book four, but I'm going to skip it.
DNF:
Both of these books really should have worked for me...
8 - Sisters of the Wolf by Patricia Miller-Schroeder. Set in the distant past, two teenage girls, one Neanderthal and one Cro-Magnon, have to work together to do... something. I really wish I could have stuck with it, but the writing was so flat and the dialogue sounded way too modern.
9 - Lost on the Prairie by MaryLou Driedger. Set in the past, a boy got was on a train trip across the prairie, but for reasons that were completely unbelievable, he got left behind in the middle of the prairie. This book had the same issues as Sisters of the Wolf: Flat writing and serious dialogue problems. The boy kept saying things like "Gee willikers!", which might be fitting for the time, but sounded so cliche and forced to my ear.
