Recently read: Robin McKinley

[steuard]

Some of Robin McKinley's books have been favorites of mine for years. Her Damar books were second only to Tolkien when I was a kid (and they're still enjoyable today), and Sunshine is fantastic (even to a non-vampire-fan like me). After asking for reviews of some of her recent books not long ago, I discovered that my local library did have them after all. Here are my thoughts about Chalice and Dragonhaven now that I've read them.

Chalice:

Mirasol, a beekeeper, finds herself thrust into a position of great magic and responsibility in her local realm after years of hedonistic misrule culminate in the deaths of the leaders of its governing council. Now, untutored, she must maintain the social and physical fabric of the land while navigating international politics with an equally unprepared new Master whose training as a priest of Fire has made his very touch a danger.

I'm torn on this book. The setting seems interesting: there is a strong magical bond between the population of each realm (ok, each "demesne") and the land itself whose implications may be very deep. The interplay of characters should be interesting: the main characters' diverse backgrounds and personalities give ample opportunity for conflict and growth, and to a substantial extent that plays out in the book. And there's a place for great energy and even joy when they finally overcome their initial uncertainty and mistrust to work together against an outside threat.

But it somehow never quite works for me. There aren't many surprises in the way the characters develop. In fact, some aspects of the story (like its sappy coda) feel almost perfunctory, as if things turn out that way simply because that's how stories are supposed to go. The secondary characters are hardly there at all, and the international politics that provides the external threat is entirely mundane. Just as bad, the magic never feels entirely real. Obviously I don't expect to understand it myself and Mirasol's lack of training means that she never really knows what's going on either, but it would be nice if at least the author seemed to have a clear idea of how everything works. There's either too much detail here or too little: Mirasol regularly guesses at what to do, we're told in detail how she does it, and then for no discernible reason everything gets better. I mean, sure, in The Blue Sword we're never told exactly how Harry Crewe to drop a mountain range on Thurra, but at least it's pretty clear what it accomplished.

In short, I don't regret having read this book but it's not a favorite; I don't feel much desire to come back to it. I wonder a little whether this tale would have been better if McKinley had managed to keep it down to a short story in her new Fire collection.

Dragonhaven:

A teenager named Jake lives in an isolated national park that is one of the last dragon preserves in this near-copy of our contemporary world. The few remaining dragons are rarely seen and generally considered dangerous animals. When Jake discovers a mortally wounded dragon and the burnt remains of the poacher that killed her, he secretly adopts her last surviving newborn child. The story proceeds to explore the political ramifications of all this, the implications for the nature and future of dragons as a species, and perhaps most of all the responsibilities of parenthood.

I enjoyed this book. It took a little while to fully connect with it, because it's written as if a chatty teenager is telling the story of what he's been doing the past few years (the style comes reasonably close to that, though there are clear echos of Robin McKinley's blog, too). But I'm a sucker for well-imagined alternative worlds and this is an enjoyable one. (There aren't many differences from our real world at all, and the handful of times the non-dragon ones come up it's usually pretty cute.)

There are a few aspects that aren't ideal. Not all that much really happens in the story, and a surprising amount of the action happens "off screen" while our focus is on Jake's efforts at successful parenting. That's probably a conscious choice of emphasis by the author, but it does blunt the impact of the events a bit. Also, the conceit that this is a memoir intended for readers within the fictional world is sometimes a bit frustrating: Jake spends quite a bit of time trying to convince his readers that dragons actually are intelligent, but we the actual readers have no reason to doubt it. And the epilogue of the book feels a bit strangely tacked on, particularly considering the number of new bits of story it contains.

Nevertheless, for me the book succeeded at one of its key goals: I found myself wanting to know more about the dragons and more about how this whole community would evolve. I ended up feeling optimistic about the future, both inside the story and even a little bit in real life. I think I'm a lot more likely to revisit this book down the road than Chalice. It's not really deep literature, but I liked it anyway.

The Outlaws of Sherwood:

Extra bonus review: I also reread McKinley's retelling of the Robin Hood story (since it was on the shelf next to Chalice and it had been years and years). I remember liking it a lot when I was a kid, but this time through I wasn't as thrilled. It felt like a fairly standard adventure story, maybe with a few interesting twists on the usual legend (particularly feminist ones) but nothing that seized my imagination as an adult. I guess I was at least a little bit aware of that as a kid, too: even though I liked it enough for it to become my "official" Robin Hood variant, it was never a book that I returned to again and again the way I returned to the Damar books. My verdict today: not bad as light reading for a kid, but not something to seek out as an adult.