Lioness Rampant finishes off Alanna's run as she makes her name in Tortallan history. 

Alanna goes on a journey (with Coram and Faithful) to find the Dominion Jewel. She wants to bring it back to Jonathan, as whoever owns the Jewel has immense power of the land. 

Now, this book is differently an improvement of the previous one and is more inline with book 2, at least to me. It also comes with something really awesome, which is the introduction of Thayet and Buri, both of who are extremely badass warriors, but one's more feminine and one's just a little hellion, and there's no way you wouldn't like them. 

The biggest downside is this thing named Liam, and he comes equipped with an ugly mustache. 

Besides that, the book is rather fabulous and a fitting end to Alanna's long adventure that started in, well, Alanna: The First Adventure.

We see her take down Roger, once and for all; duel her longtime rival and former friend Alex; and finally get together with George while coming to terms with the fact her and Jonathan were always meant to be friends and nothing more. It also sees us through the death of a longtime friend in the form of Faithful, who has done all he could as Alanna's guardian and will be returning to the Goddess' side, though something tells me this isn't the last time (first?) we'll be seeing him.

This isn't the last time we'll be seeing Alanna, however. There are other heroines of Tortall that need their stories to be told, and Alanna will be there to help them along. 

*Contains some general spoilers
The final book in the Lioness Quartet. Enjoyable, but had a few questionable moments. Mostly just Liam is 34 and Alanna's like 20 at most. And no one seems to find this objectionable. It also bothered me that she and George didn't seem to have ended their relationship in the last book, but she still moves on with Liam. And even though she

ends up with George

in the end, she didn't think much about him when she was with Liam. The quest for the dominion jewel seemed a bit weird/unwise to me, because you have this super powerful magical object that's been safely hidden away for centuries, if not millennia, and then Alanna wants to find it for no other reason than she wants to prove that she's a worthy knight and she's bored. The ethics of bringing back such a powerful magical object were NEVER discussed, and although it does happen that Tortall is in trouble, Alanna had no idea of this when she went to get the jewel, and seemed to think it would be a nice trophy. The actual getting of it was a bit disappointing too, she just wanders off my herself into a blizzard without even telling anyone (in the MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT) and some weird magical being is just like, it's over here, oh wait, I guess you have to fight me, but obviously you're going to end up with this potentially super dangerous magical object, which didn't seem like it really did that much. I mean, I think Alanna should have at least told someone, and probably taken at least one person with her, but most of the other characters weren't upset that she had run off at night into a blizzard, just relieved that she wasn't dead. And I would understand if she had known Tortall was in trouble, but when she didn't, it seems to me that the jewel would end up being more trouble than it's worth (wouldn't people try to steal it? How would you know someone was going to use it honorably/ethically?).
Also, I understand Tom's motivation for wanting to prove that he could bring back the dead, but why he decides to bring back that particular person was never explained. I mean, Tom hated him, so this made no sense at all to me. I understand why Delia would have been trying to goad Tom into bringing him back, but given Tom's hard-headedness, it would have made more sense to me if he had said that he could bring back the dead, but would prove it by bringing back someone else. (I also strongly dislike the trope where a dead villain comes back to life - not if they're suspected dead, or probably dead, but if they've been killed and buried, let them stay dead. Otherwise, how do you know that they're really dead the next time? Not to mention that it seems to me a bit lazy - just come up with another problem/villain for the characters to deal with, rather than re-hashing old wounds.) I also found Claw's motivations and plots to be rather unclear, especially when we finally find out how he is. Does he want to usurp the throne? Why? Just because Jon stood up to him when they were boys? Does he just want to dethrone George? That makes even less sense to me, even though it seems to be his primary goal. He doesn't know George, and it just wasn't clear to me why he would want to be king of the thieves. Although, I should note that I listened to the audiobook while doing other things, and so some of this may have been more clear to me if I had read the print format while not multitasking.

And I thought Faithful's death was very unnecessary and pointless.

But overall a mostly entertaining read that capped off the series nicely, while leaving room for the future series based in this world.