The Hero and the Crown
Aug. 11th, 2018 09:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsThe 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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Date: 2018-08-13 08:11 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2018-08-13 08:15 pm (UTC)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.