lightreads (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lightreads) wrote2018-08-11 09:44 pm
lightreads) wrote2018-08-11 09:44 pm
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The Hero and the Crown
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.
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.
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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.
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