The Hero and the Crown, Robin McKinley

Wow, I don’t know why I didn’t really like The Hero and the Crown very much on the first go round. It’s full of all the kinds of things I love: love stories that aren’t just simple love-at-first-sight or we-grew-up-together-and-now-we’re-in-love, but something more complicated that that; a world with a history and a future, outside of what we’ve got; a heroine who works through flaws and barriers to become a hero. And the last sentences — ach! Lovely.

It’s not some straightforward children’s story in which a heroine goes forth and slays a dragon. That happens, but it happens as part of a longer journey: the dragon isn’t the end, but only really the beginning of Aerin’s journey. It doesn’t solve all her issues and let her go home unscathed, unchanged, to a court that’s suddenly ready to accept her. Aerin’s story is harder than that.

Looking at my old review/notes on this, I was disappointed by the worldbuilding — which I think is funny, because though it’s subtle, there’s plenty here. The surka, the crown, old heroes, Luthe’s background, why the animals follow Aerin: there’s so much that doesn’t get elucidated, but remains there for you to turn over and wonder at. McKinley doesn’t give you all the answers about her world in one go, and I doubt that The Blue Sword will answer all of it either. Maybe you have to do a little more work to really appreciate the history of the world, because McKinley does nothing so clumsy as sit you in a history lesson with Aerin to learn about it.

Overall, given the subtlety of parts of this and the wistfulness of the love stories, I’m not entirely sure how I’d have taken this as a child. It may be a prime example of a story that works on two levels: Aerin waving her sword around for younger readers, winning the day with her prowess, while the older readers might taste more of the bittersweetness of her immortality and her twin-nature.

Rating; 4/5

Beauty, Robin McKinley

I think I’ll blame my partner’s Disney song playlist for making me want to (re)read a bunch of Beauty and the Beast retellings. The obvious place to start (for me, anyway) is with Robin McKinley’s two attempts at telling the story, Beauty and Rose Daughter. Beauty is perhaps the less delicate of the two, being suited to a younger audience in terms of complexity, language, etc, but it still makes a good story. You come to care for the little family, and learn to care for the Beast; the mysteries of the Beast’s castle are genuinely interesting, though how confining someone to a castle which contains a library full of all the books ever written and yet to be written is a punishment, I’m not entirely certain.

(You can see why I empathise with this version of Beauty, who loves her books and her studies, who reads and rereads Malory’s Le Morte Darthur.)

As usual, then, I found this a charming read, and I liked the little references to domesticity that are nearly inevitable with McKinley — the sisters’ rough hands as they learn their new work, their learning curve. And as usual, the thing I disliked most was that Beauty had to be made to match her name, in some magical transformation that made little sense — the goodness of her is in her inner beauty, and why on earth she needs to have dancing amber eyes, I couldn’t say. I liked that Beauty started out plain. I would rather she come to some happy acceptance of that than get a wish to be beautiful — that doesn’t solve anything.

If I’m remembering the key difference between this and Rose Daughter rightly, too, it’s a little awful that the Beast vanishes and changes so much too, leaving Beauty faced with a man she doesn’t know, who doesn’t even know his own name. He’s the same person, but then, you can’t really say he is when everything’s so different and suddenly the Beast she loved is a handsome prince, with very little explanation. It would, perhaps, be better if Beauty instantly recognised him instead of feeling so confused — at least then there would be a sense of continuity, of the importance of knowing what someone is like rather than what they look like.

Rating: 3/5

Chalice, Robin McKinley

For a book that I originally gave three stars, and found somewhat… disappointing, it probably seems weird that I’ve come back to it for a second time. But actually, I’ve grown very fond of it. I love the fact that it isn’t just a generic medieval Europe, but something that has some of those aspects while having rules, rituals, histories and roles of its own. And yet at the same time, it’s still rooted in the earth: in the common elements, in water and milk and honey, in the straightforward clear sight of a beekeeper called to higher things.

Mirasol makes a great character: neither so knowledgeable about the world she lives in that worldbuilding ends up being ‘as you know, Bob’, but not so ignorant that she’s completely at sea. We come into the story when she’s starting to find some purchase, starting to figure out what she needs to do, but even by the end of the story, she’s not all-powerful, so special she can fix everything. I like that a lot: the down-to-earthness of her; the fact that she turns to books for the knowledge she needs and just reads desperately, almost indiscriminately; the fact that she is so overwhelmed, unready and untrained, and yet does what she has to do.

I also like the sense of strain and work that comes through. It’s not effortless for Mirasol and the Master to save their land; it comes slowly, in fits and starts, as they adjust to each other and to the circumstances. The last section is one long hard slog for Mirasol, and she isn’t even sure she’s doing the right thing, only that she knows she has to do something.

I think I can still understand why people find it disappointing or unsatisfying — there’s so much unsaid about the world, so much more that could be done with it, and Mirasol’s story is only beginning here. And yet Chalice is whole in and of itself, a standalone fantasy story in a world that feels bigger than the story, which is exactly the kind of thing I like.

Despite the fantasy setting, it’s not really something to read for the sense of magic. One comparison that comes to mind now is Lifelode (Jo Walton) — the importance of the domestic in that.

Rating: 5/5