The Hero and the Crown - Robin McKinley

★★★★★★★★★★ (Somewhere between 6/10 and 7/10)

This book is one of those strange reminders that books do change.  The words are always the same, the number of pages stays the same, and the events are the same, but each time I read a book I’ve read before, I find something different, or it makes me think something new about it.  I last read The Hero and the Crown maybe four or five years ago.  Until I read it this time, I had considered it a very good novel and always meant to go back and read it again.  This time, my mind is a little torn about what to say about this book.  The story is the same, but this book reminds me that I’ve changed.

The plot in this book is simply fantastic; I’ve always thought so and still do this time around.  Aerin is a brilliant character, and would be an admirable, if unrealistic, role model.  She had such strength without being strong, intelligence without being brainy, courage without pride.  Aerin just keeps surprising me with every turn of the page.  Yet, she’s not alone.  Her trusty sidekick is an old broken-down horse with a bad leg, Talat.  I’m a sucker for novels where animals are important to the story, and this one just hit home. (Later Aerin gets an army of wild dogs and cats. Yay!) Talat is almost as incredible as Aerin herself.  He went from being a horse that everyone had given up on, to the prideful stallion he was in his younger days, despite his weak leg.  He found strength where there ought to have been none, and courage where no other horse would be brave.  Just two bold characters waiting for an adventure!

Where I get a little iffy about The Hero and the Crown is in the pace.  When I read is this time, I felt like the story kept jumping around from place to place, and time to time.  There’s a flashback that takes multiple chapters to finish; there are episodes that are so short, I wondered why they were there at all; and the end just seems to drag on a bit.  Just when I thought it was done, I turned the page and there’s another two chapters.  Normally, this would be awesome, since I usually hate for books to end, but here, I felt it was done, and was a little surprised when I found that I was wrong. 

The two events that bothered me the most were Aerin’s two big battles.  The first with Maur started off with promise: she was practically running headlong into a battle even she believed she would not survive, and she had no one to help her but her horse.  Maybe I expected too much, but I thought there would be a longer battle scene with more triumph on Aerin’s side.  In reality, it was very brief, and Aerin won by sheer luck and willpower.  Even Aerin’s attitude became depressing at one point.  She basically gives up and still keeps fighting; Talat has more hope than she does and he’s running towards a huge dragon!  This battle does serve a purpose, as it is necessary later in the story, but I wish it had been as I remembered it.

I had a similar problem with Aerin’s battle with Agsded.  This one seemed to be over before it even began, and, again, she won by sheer luck.  She had no idea how to defeat him, and a last ditch effort with no thought behind it saved the day.  I would have liked some more detail about the time issues involved, and a little more banter between the fighters, but I just assume that to McKinley, this battle was not as important as the results of it.

In the end, everything that I expected to happen happened, because I remembered that it did, and I was satisfied overall.  It’s just these little details that I had forgotten that irked me more than I liked.  I still like The Hero and the Crown, so Robin McKinley wins another round.