Book Review: Pegasus

I've had an up and down relationship with Robin McKinley's works, some I've loved (like The Blue Sword), others I've thought were okay (such as Chalice) and some I had, issues with (Sunshine). So why keep reading her works? I suppose it's because her books sound interesting and I just can't tell which ones I'm going to like. But I was curious about this book, it's the first in a two book series although McKinley says it's just one story, she just writes so slow that it would take her years to write one, 800 page book (this one is 400 pages so I suspect the second is of similar size) and couldn't keep living on the money from her other books that long (which is perfectly fine by me, especially since an 800 page book would be unheard of for a YA book, I can't think of more than a few, if that many, over 600 pages). According to her website the second part won't be out until 2014 (this book came out back in 2010, I can see now why she was worried about writing it all in one go) so I'll probably have to reread this one at least once between now and then.

Pegasus by Robin McKinley

   A very nicely done cover, it follows the rule of thirds so it feels well balanced, the left and right feel balanced yet are not entirely symmetrical (and it's heavier on the left, ie, the side that most people who read left to right look first) and the characters look the way they are described in the book, I like it.

Summary: Since Sylviianel is the princess of the kingdom of Balsinland she is bound to a pegasus of the royal pegasus family, following in a nearly thousand year old tradition from when humans first settled these lands and created a treaty with the native pegasi. But she and her pegasus, Ebon, are different, they have no need for the cumbersome sign language and specially trained speakers who traditionally mediate between the races but can instead speak mind to mind, an unheard of break from tradition that sets all the human magicians on edge. As the country comes under attack from the other legendary creatures that reside there, many who have been seen in generations, the human magicians point to their "unholy connection" as the reason but the pegasi instead see them as the solution to this growing problem. 

The Good: Some mythical creatures appear in modern day fiction less often than others and, while not unheard of, pegasi fall into this group and it's always nice to read something a little different. McKinley has also created a rich and complex background for the pegasi, quiet possibly with more detail in it than she put into the human side of things, and I really enjoyed those parts. I also liked how pegasi weren't the only mythical creatures but rather that there are many that everyone has to deal with regularly*. It was also nice to see such a close, platonic female-male friendship (as opposed to a romantic one) take center stage since that's a bit rare for YA fiction and I generally prefer platonic relationships to romantic ones. Sylviianel and Ebon's relationship is certainly the heart of the story and it was paced just right to feel completely believable.

The Bad: I had a few problems with Sylviianel which I believe were similar to the problems I had with Sunshine as well, a confident character has a fairly reasonable viewpoint of the world, viewpoint changes due to events in the story (which is entirely understandable), and then they become rather wishy-washy and don't do as much. I don't like this as much since I like characters that DO things, a story is a set of connected events where something happens after all, and it's entirely possible that she will do more things in the sequel but I found the end of this book to be rather dull and it really shouldn't have been dull. So I guess what I often don't like about McKinley's books are the general types of characters she often uses and I really hate I don't hate the next book for that.

So, excellent setting and I enjoyed the central relationship but I'm not so happy with Sylviianel's character development of sorts. Hopefully I'll like the second book but since I liked Spindle's End right up to the very end before getting annoyed I won't be holding my breath.



*One of my random pet peeves is that I'm really bothered by stories where there is only one kind of mythical creatures and that's it, probably because there's rarely a good reason for it and they come off feeling more like a plot device than anything else, the exact opposite of what is going on here.

Book Review: Fire

This is supposed to be part of a collection of short stories focusing on the various elements, eventually. I remember reading bits of the first book (Water) back in high school and Fire just came out this past year. Part of the delay is that two stories were supposed to be part of this collection but they became full-length novels instead (Sunshine and Chalice) so Robin McKinley has been rather busy. I haven't read any works by the other author, (although I have seen The Ropemaker at my local library) so, enough with the introduction, onto the review!

Fire by Robin McKinley and Peter Dickinson

  Well, the cover works but it isn't that inspired. It's quite possible I'm a bit more cynical about the cover after my business in photography class but looking at it I started figuring out how much the publisher would have paid for a stock image for a North American, English language only release with a one year license. Besides that, I have a bone to pick with the typography (and I never care about the typography!). They used a really cheesy font for the titles that looked like the words had fire in them and I thought it was rather dumb actually, but again, this is just me being nitpicky.

Summary: Five stories involving fire and magic, from dragons to salamanders to hellhounds, fire can be both a destructive element and a protective one as well. As a quick note, the stories in the book are numbered out of order (I think it goes 2, 3, 5, 4, and then 1) and I read them in the order of the numbers. There doesn't seem to be any special reasoning to the numbers so you can read them in any order.

The Good: I liked the story "Hellhound" the most (heh, and after reading McKinley's blog I didn't even have to check and see who the author was) and I thought it was a nice "all the myths are true" story in the end (now that I think about it, the overall mood of the story reminded me a bit of Fire and Hemlock). I also liked "First Flight" (by McKinley again) for it's world building, actually, I remember she did another book about dragons once, I wonder if those two are connected. And that really sums up what I like about her books (aka, why I keep reading them despite all the other issues I have with them), she does some really neat stuff with world building that keeps my enthralled and makes me remember the story when I'm done. So, if you're already a fan of her work, you'll enjoy this one too.

The Bad: Well, I had issues with the protagonists of all the stories really. In Dickinson's stories my problems lay more with the plot now that I think about it (the story started in the beginning, got a bit confusing and then explained EVERYTHING in the end, no hints along the way to figure it out myself and that's what I love to do while reading) and just wasn't that interested in his stories. For McKinley, a lot of her characters are really shy and I find myself yelling at them to explain themselves so the plot can move forward*. It's a problem I have with a lot of her protagonists and perhaps I am being too harsh on them. However, I like characters who do stuff, no matter how small, to advance the plot and her characters just either take too long to do so or are too passive for my taste.

I have heard McKinley say that yes, someday there will be four anthology books someday, it's just that her stories keep getting away from her. "First Flight" was a hundred pages long and one story she was working on for the next anthology (Air) is now a two volume doorstopper (Pegasus, which I haven't read yet but hope to soon). Here's to hoping that they finish with the books soon, within the next ten years at least please?


*Okay, I was a really shy person in middle school and still am a bit shy now but I'm able to at least do stuff, so seeing how I managed to grow but these characters didn't makes it a bit hard to sympathize.

Book Review: Sunshine

I've been following more YA authors on twitter recently so I actually know when most of them are putting out a new book. So I'd put Robin McKinley's Sunshine on the list after coming across it, it's not a new book but it was going to be re-released with a new cover oriented more for the YA audience so I guess that's why I kept hearing about it. I was a bit hesitant when I found it at the library (the older version, apparently there are no changes other than the cover, I'm amused that I still found the older version in the YA section anyway) since I've liked some of her works before (The Blue Sword, Beauty) but not liked others (The Hero and the Crown not so much and I have issues with the ending of Spindle's End, only with the later part of the book though). But i grabbed the book anyway, I'm on a vampire kick anyway so I might as well see if it's as good a book at others (authors) have said.

Sunshine by Robin McKinley

The cover seems cliched but in terms of literary cliches. Oh look, it's a gothic, shadowy chandler, on a high ceiling with elaborate, old world molding, and that red tint must mean it's a vampire book! Although, that is a bit of a visual cliche in the literary world, heck, if I saw that ceiling on HGTV my first response would be "...vampire ceiling?"

Summary: Sunshine is just your average baker in a world that is sometime after a great, apocalyptic war yet still a century or two before the end. She's utterly and totally convinced she's normal, family history and her own history aside, but is forced to confront that she's different from the majority of humanity after being the first person to escape from the "others," vampires, no matter how much she wants to deny it.

The Good: Well these vampires are the farthest thing from sexy I can think of. There's never a concrete description of what they look like but apparently they're monsters who just share the same general shape as a human, you don't see that variant of vampire that often. The story really goes back to the original vampire stories where they were nothing like humans, incredibly scary, and rather flat and evil characters. It's certainly a change and a change is always refreshing. Also unusual to see a character that's a baker and it was really nice to see so much of the story take place in the bakery, again it's something different and that's always nice.

The Bad: I really didn't like Sunshine at all. She has this habit of talking to people and then going on for a page long monologue in her head before continuing with the conversation (literally a page, even if this was a paperback that's really unsettling, off-putting, and simply confusing). She's also whining a lot in these monologues, some whining is expected and acceptable in any story but there comes a point where the character either has to gear up and deal with the story or they don't and why is the story even about them anyway if they're not doing anything about it? None of the other characters felt really fleshed out to me (and this isn't a short book either, it's right around 400 pages in paperback format), honestly none of them and I was wondering if I skipped a scene or two or if some were cut out because it was so glaring for some of the major supporting characters so I didn't get to love and adore any side characters in the story. One more thing, which I consider a rather large problem although not everyone will see it this way I suppose, is that McKinley has written herself into a corner with the vampires. On the one hand, she has very well established that these are not the sexy vampires of modern pop culture and that there is no way in hell that you want a relationship with them considering most people can't stand their mere presence. Yet she seems to be writing a Beauty and the Beast-esque story* with no explantion of why/HOW there can be romance. That bothered me, and the almost sex scene did as well but that was more because it came out of nowhere and I'm usually annoyed when I come across an unexpected and detailed paragraph about a guys dick**.

So, it's not a bad book per say, but I really didn't like the herorine, felt that by and large the setting wasn't developed well enough (it's not for a while that you even find out any details about the war) and neither were any of the characters besides Sunshine. So, no urge to reread, recommend, or buy the book, sorry guys!
And I remembered the other day that I forgot to review a manga so that'll be tomorrow's review, good thing too since I'll be swamped the next two days and not having to read anything else/shorter things to review will help.



*Again, this is at least the third time she's used that story variation, and when I think about it, all the stories I've read by her involve the opposites attract theory of romance, just the male lead happens to be at least a bit monstrous.
**Being serious there and, to make this clear, I have no objections to characters having sex in the stories, I just prefer it to be off screen. This is probably because I had to read some pretty detailed sex scenes back as a freshman in high school (even tvtropes agrees with me here: "Good People Have Good Sex. Not to mention excruciatingly detailed sex. ") so I reeeaaalllyyy hate reading sex scenes now. It won't detract from the whole book but it does leave me a bit grumpy if I didn't see it coming.