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.