Author: Robin McKinley
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Rating: WORTHY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!
Erratum:
P77 "...when hey made camp." should be "...when they made camp."
This is the first Robin McKinley novel I've read. I've read some good reviews about her work, so I thought maybe it was time that I jumped in and took a look. This is a fantasy story, of which I have to say that while I've read a few by various authors, I'm not really a great fan of the genre. Sorcerers, dragons, elves, and sword-fighting are not something which really trips my trigger, but they are intriguing and once in a rare while a good one comes along, so I keep mining them like a dwarf, looking for those gems.
This is a novel of just over 200 pages, although the cover is numbered as page one in the advance review copy, so the actual page count of the text is somewhat less than you might think. It's also apparently a Newbery medal winner, which experience has taught me to avoid like the plague, but I picked up this one before I knew about the medal, so I was committed to reading it, unfortunately. Maybe this will be the exception, thinks I: a medal winner which isn't pretentious garbage and which actually makes for non-cringe-worthy reading? The fact that this was available as an advance review copy was surprising, though. If this is such an old novel (it was originally published thirty years ago this year!), then why is it being offered as an ARC? Curiouser and curiouser!
The story is of princess Aerin, the feisty child of a king who has married more than once and who has daughters by more than one wife. Although Aerin appears not to have any of the witchery with which her mother was supposedly endowed, she is very self-motivated (when she's actually interested in something) and pursues a rather independent and somewhat tomboyish lifestyle in which she's aided by Tor, a cousin who gives her sword-fighting lessons, and who quite obviously (rather annoyingly so, actually) has the hots for her. He gives her a specially-manufactured sword for her eighteenth birthday, which is curiously the same time as he quits giving her lessons.
Aerin doesn't mind, as it happens because for the last few years, she's been nurturing a growing interest in dragons. The only ones known of in her time were little ones, but she reads old books and discovers that larger dragons may still be around. She also discovers a recipe for a skin cream which supposedly protects against dragon fire. After immense experimentation, she actually gets the formula to work, and as soon as an opportunity arises to go fight a dragon, she grabs it, sneaking out before the king's men can get there! I like this girl!
Having thus been successful, Aerin discovers that her father is now persuaded to let her pursue her new calling, and she embarks upon gaining invaluable dragon-fighting experience and also a reputation amongst the king's subjects for being the brave fiery-haired dragon-slayer. But can she face-down the greatest dragon of all, Maur, which is a fully-grown dragon of fearsome reputation? And if she does survive the encounter, how will she react to the knowledge that that there is something far more dangerous than Maur in her future: Agsded, and for him she will have to raise her game above and beyond everything else she's done.
This, despite being a medal winner, turned out to be a really good read, so I recommend it.
