Lioness Rampant is interesting because I can see Pierce moving already to correct her earlier mistakes. She'd been working on the "I'm not like other girls~~" thing since In The Hand Of The Goddess, with.. some success, and she started making an effort to introduce more women characters in Woman Who Rides Like A Man. But she gives us Thayet and Buri early on in Lioness Rampant, as well as several minor women characters of high quality, and the difference between how she writes the Bazhir and her K'miri characters is really striking. I'm not trying to argue that her racism evaporated 3/4ths of the way through Song Of The Lioness -- that's patently false; I assume some of you read Battle Magic (ugh). But the improvements here are nontrivial.
Every Song Of The Lioness book shows a noticeable jump in the quality of the writing overall. In Lioness Rampant, the changes are less about the prose and narrative structure, and more about content. There are a lot of moving parts in a good novel. It's intriguing to watch a writer evolve imo. I write fiction too; not so much lately, but still. You can learn a lot from other people's mistakes. Pierce is one of the authors who's influenced me the most; I've been reading her work almost all my life. There's a lot of reread value in her books for me, both as a fan and as an aspiring novelist. Her material is far from flawless, but I find it valuable.
