The Hero and the Crown

[lightreads]

The Hero and the Crown

3/5. Fantasy about Aeron, the very special king's daughter whose people don't understand her but really she's so magical and special you guys.

I deeply disappointed my wife by finding this not to my taste. Except for a section in the middle where Aerin literally spends several days lying in a river in terrible pain deciding whether to die. By pure chance, I read that segment while huddled in my living room at 2 in the morning in horrific pain and kind of wishing for sweet death. This was just five days ago, but it's already a distant, hallucinatory memory. Maybe I got flamed by a dragon. Maybe Aerin had a kidney stone and couldn't keep narcotics down.

Anyway, this book crystalized for me that I don't actually like McKinley's tell-tell-tell style, no matter how much everyone tells me I'm supposed to. Though I do give bonus points for having her bang whatshisface then run off and marry other whatshisface without a blink. Minus points for not really engaging with Aerin's sense of alienation and how it is rooted in actual alienation, in actual not-entirely-humanness. A lot of that got sublimated into the mean girl bullying, which, yawn.

Comments

[the_rck]

I'm fonder of the McKinley books I read during my teens than I am of any of the ones I read after. I'm not certain that it's a difference in quality, either. I think it's that, as I got older, I connected less well to the stories. I suspect that McKinley is one of those authors in whose works I created depth as I read that I might not be able to find again on a reread.

If that makes sense?

There are a lot of books I read young that, on a reread a decade or two later, are missing things I would have sworn were there.

[lightreads]

Oh, yeah. Beauty was the only McKinley I think I actually read as a kid, and I remember it being far more intense and magical than it really is.

[readerjane]

Oh dear, I'm sorry you didn't like it.

I think you're right about encountering McKinley as a child rather than later. I admit, when I re-read Hero, the mean-girl stuff at the beginning seems like wearisome, like having my arm twisted to love Harry Potter because everyone is mean to the boy under the stairs instead of finding out first off what's good about Harry himself.

But having a girl who deduces the recipe for kenet, doggedly, painstakingly - that made me love Aerin. And seeing her realize how inadequate kenet was against Maur but doing her best anyway, and then doing her best again when killing Maur still didn't defeat him, cemented this story's place for me.

[norah]

That was what made it for me, truly. I have actually shared this book with my kid. The way everything is hard for her and she just does it over and over until she *can* do it was the training montage I fell in love with.

[thefourthvine]

My wife also loves this book, but she first read it when she was much younger than when I tried it, and boy does that make a difference. I stopped reading McKinley years ago, because I realized she didn’t work for adult me.

[norah]

Yup. Exactly this - loved her books I read young (except Deerskin, what the FUCK) and yawned through the rest. So many authors are like that! Once you (TFV) sent me this amazing shipment of basically all your favorite YA (have I ever thanked you for that? Because I am not sure why you did it but it was the most amazing present, like, an ENTIRE BOX OF GOOD BOOKS) I liked all of it and loved some of it but I could also tell I was not having the formative experiences you had with it. There is something so magical about the worlds we glom on to early!

[jadelennox]

I still love all the McKinley I read at the right age, and can barely read the stuff she's written since. She was absolutely right for me at a certain point, but that's how some books are.

In any case, one of the things I got from McKinley -- which I also got from Tamora Pierce, in books that are similarly age-appropriate but don't necessarily hold up -- is the idea of healthy female serial monogamy. Everything else I was reading, for kids or for adults, was very One True Love oriented, and both Tamora Pierce and Robin McKinley said, "hey, you can love both whatshisface and other whatshisface, and you can even bone both of them, and as long as you are honest with both whatshisfaces that's all awesome."

[lightreads]

Yeah, that's true. And rare. I was going to say you got some of that from McCaffrey, but she was so inconsistent about it.

[jadelennox]

Yeah, and McCaffery included so much gross entitlement about the lord of the manor fucking the serfs, and so much rape normalization, that it put me right off in my wee adolescent sexuality. Much like Piers Anthony, come to think of it. Also for some reason the age and experience imbalances (Menolly/Robinton is a massive squick for me) bothered the heck out of me with McCaffery, only bothered me with Pierce with a few relationships, and never even hit my radar with McKinley.

God, the 1980s were such a disaster for healthy romance writing, across the board.