Arrows of the Queen, by Mercedes Lackey

Read
Another Half Price Special (although I have vague recollections of having read it several years ago).

Bottom Line
A great deal of fun, even if there's not much substantive weight to it.  A great book for an airplane ride.  I'm labeling it YA with some hesitation, because it was obviously meant for an adult audience.  The protagonist, however, is someone that the YA audience will identify and sympathize with.

Full Review
Mercedes Lackey has created the quintessential fantasy novel universe in the imagined kingdom of Valdemar.  Complete with magic, a kingdom perpetually on the edge of disaster, and an intrepid band of (sometimes) unlikely heroes, the Valdemar novels draw the reader in with their fast paced plots and strongly determined characters.

Arrows of the Queen is, I believe, one of the earlier novels.  As such, it not only makes a great introductory read to the world of the author but also provides a stand-alone experience that the later novels lack.  [Note that this is the first of a three-part series, and while the other novels in the series have prologues that attempt to catch the reader up on the action, the entire series is best read in order.]

The main character of Arrows is Talia, a plucky thirteen year old girl who'd rather be reading or running around outdoors than staying inside and behaving like a properly subordinate female.  This attitude gets her in frequent trouble with her family; luckily for Talia (and in the deus ex machina fashion so common to novels of the genre) she is whisked away in an unlikely rescue and brought to the capital of Valdemar.  There, she is surprised and somewhat shocked to find her curiosity and intelligence are considered a boon rather than a problem.

Of course, it's a good thing that she's a bright child, because she's soon thrown into all sorts of problems that, quite frankly, a thirteen year old, even this precocious thirteen year old, would be rather ill-equipped to handle.  The brilliance of the book is that the character is so well written that most readers won't stop to question how Talia is managing all these problems because they're frantically flipping pages to discover what happens.

The ability to tell a compelling story is what really sets a Mercedes Lackey book apart from much of the fantasy fiction currently on the shelves.  I'll admit that sometimes the teenage angst/self reflection got to be a bit much at times (another reason I'm giving this the YA label), but the well written plot more than makes up for it.