The Blue Sword

And yet another one from my picking up books my wife has left around the house. Robin McKinley is one of her favorite authors.

There is a theme amongst the heroines in the novels I have read so far. At least one parent is dead. They like reading a lot. The heroines also generally have a malcontent with their lives and yearn for something more, they would be open for an adventure.

From here on there are plot spoilers.

I liked how this story was told, if at times it came across as formal. An interesting aspect of the writing style, going against general convention, was that there were paragraphs in which two different characters both had dialogue.

There were two primary cultures presented. One was imperial and appeared to have a “women in the home” mentality. There was a queen but it appeared that women in general were meant to be “ladies”. In the other desert / mountain society it was again male dominated but there had been prior women heroines is the past, though the role of women had since subsided and they were less involved in defense and war then they had been previously. Thus, our heroine, Harry, becomes an inspiration to women in the of the desert / mountain society to play a more active role in the more honored warrior caste.

While there is a rather large cast of characters there is relatively little dialogue, the story is not very heavy on dialogue. Furthermore, as with most of McKinley’s novels I have read so far, you spend a lot of time in the head of the characters and are told how they think things through rather than being presented thought processes through dialogue.

Overall I think this made for a significantly better read than Shadows.

Shadows

Another one from my picking up books my wife has left around the house collection. Robin McKinley is one of her favorite authors. I am going to leave plot alone in this review.

Overall there is a fairly interesting story to be found within this book. But… first there are about one hundred pages of non-story. Essentially you get snippets of world building while the narrator of the book rehashes the same issues more or less over and over again and pretty much from the same angle and/or perspective. It is extremely frustrating. Throughout this section of the book I keep hearing God’s line of “GET ON WITH IT!” from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. There were a few moments later one where I felt this was true as well, but nowhere near as much as in the first hundred pages.

Sometimes we are getting a stream of consciousness narrative from the narrator. This would be fine with me if this was consistent throughout the book and was not so mundane for the first one hundred pages but we rarely get this thereafter, and not during the rising action and climax of the plot which would have perhaps added something more.

My wife admits that when she rereads this book she often skips very large sections of the book until it gets into the action. The book does ultimately present an interesting world and a good story but when over 25% of the book (by page count) is superfluous I feel like the story either needed to be shorter or have a lot more substance and consequence to it.