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Last week I went back to my roots as an S&S fantasy heroine addict. Somehow I managed to mostly skip actually reading too much Robin McKinley when I was in grade school; I think I borrowed either Beauty or Spindle's End from a friend and have spent the last twelve years vaguely intending to read more. So I picked up a copy of The Hero and the Crown.
This book is pretty much the essence of kickass-lady fantasy: the heroine fights an intensely patriarchal pseudo-medieval social system, and also dragons. She is socially ostracized, her mother is dead, she is nobility (in this case she is a princess, but McKinley makes different word so that this cannot be A Princess Book). And she has a destiny! A destiny of saving the world! From things of great magical power and destructiveness! And there is a sword with magic powers! And also there are a lot of slightly awkward place-names and made-up words, which I can only fault her for so much because that stuff is hard.
In summary, this book covers the journey of Aerin of Damar, the child of the king but who is not crown princess because people think her dead mother was a witch and also she is a girl, as she learns to kill dragons and plays with herb magic and has social problems and fights a bigger dragon and almost gets killed several times, and then learns magic from some weird mage dude and acquires a legendary sword and goes to Mordor (basically) and saves her country and becomes popular and gets her man. As you do.
One of my favorite things about this book is that most of the dragons are not big great mountains of creature that inspire awe and fear and all that stuff we normally think of as dragons. This book has, basically, a draco vulgaris and a draco nobilis, although they are of course quite different than the ones in Guards! Guards! The little dragons are mean pests about the size of dogs, still very dangerous but unglamorous to kill. The big dragon is basically a giant evil dinosaur of fire--definitely not one of the friendly articulate dragons from most of the dragon books I read as a kid.
For someone like me, this book is pretty much the ultimate in comfort food--lots of familiar tropes, enough to be just cliche enough to laugh at occasionally, but well-written and spun into a new and engaging story.
This book is pretty much the essence of kickass-lady fantasy: the heroine fights an intensely patriarchal pseudo-medieval social system, and also dragons. She is socially ostracized, her mother is dead, she is nobility (in this case she is a princess, but McKinley makes different word so that this cannot be A Princess Book). And she has a destiny! A destiny of saving the world! From things of great magical power and destructiveness! And there is a sword with magic powers! And also there are a lot of slightly awkward place-names and made-up words, which I can only fault her for so much because that stuff is hard.
In summary, this book covers the journey of Aerin of Damar, the child of the king but who is not crown princess because people think her dead mother was a witch and also she is a girl, as she learns to kill dragons and plays with herb magic and has social problems and fights a bigger dragon and almost gets killed several times, and then learns magic from some weird mage dude and acquires a legendary sword and goes to Mordor (basically) and saves her country and becomes popular and gets her man. As you do.
One of my favorite things about this book is that most of the dragons are not big great mountains of creature that inspire awe and fear and all that stuff we normally think of as dragons. This book has, basically, a draco vulgaris and a draco nobilis, although they are of course quite different than the ones in Guards! Guards! The little dragons are mean pests about the size of dogs, still very dangerous but unglamorous to kill. The big dragon is basically a giant evil dinosaur of fire--definitely not one of the friendly articulate dragons from most of the dragon books I read as a kid.
For someone like me, this book is pretty much the ultimate in comfort food--lots of familiar tropes, enough to be just cliche enough to laugh at occasionally, but well-written and spun into a new and engaging story.
