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I absolutely adored Robin McKinley's The Blue Sword when I first read it at the age of 11 or 12. It had a capable, likeable heroine who didn't need anyone else to get her out of trouble, and a big loyal cat, and some wonderful friendships, and a romantic subplot which was sweet but not threateningly sexy, and after discovering it in the library I read it and the prequel, The Hero and the Crown, several times each. I never owned my own copy, though, but when someone posted a picture of the cover of their copy for a book meme on Facebook recently I found myself really wanting to re-read it, so I sought out a secondhand copy on Amazon (the availability of McKinley's books on Kindle is quite patchy, and this isn't available, though The Hero and the Crown is).

Re-reading something you used to love so much is a slightly scary undertaking. What if the book has been visited by the Suck Fairy in the intervening years, and the amazing story turns out to be rather dull and ordinary? Happily, The Blue Sword remains as wonderful as it always was; Harry is still likeable, her friends are even lovelier than I remembered, and Corlath hasn't turned into the kind of masterful hero who makes me want to throw books across the room. I was a little bit worried that the book's setting, which is fairly obviously a kind of fantasy-British-Raj-India, might have aged badly, but while I can't really see it as anything but a fantasy India analogue the details are vague enough for it to read as Generic Fantasy Hot Country With Some Critique Of Colonialism rather than anything more appropriative. There were even a couple of really very ordinary sentences (really, really very ordinary - one of them was "He did not look very majestic while glaring at a cat") which I found had spent the last 30 years sitting somewhere in the recesses of my memory, completely detached from their context, so that I was both surprised to find that this was where they were from and delighted to encounter them again.

It's still a lovely read. I can see why I read it so much as a child. Harry starts off rather lonely and feeling adrift in life, unsure of her place in the world, and ends up finding love and community and a place to belong, which is a fantasy I very much needed in those days, when I was awkward and geeky and never seemed to be able to make real friends. (I loved the Chalet School for much the same reasons, but that didn't have swords.) It's not a book that deals in shades of grey; the enemies Harry has to fight are barely glimpsed but demonic and evil, so there's never any question that there might be two sides to the war, while all the human characters are genuinely nice, thoughful and noble and trying to do good, with only some very minor disagreements and misunderstandings to get in their way. I suspect that, having rediscovered it, it'll continue to be a book I reach for when I want a comfort re-read, and I'm very glad it's held up as well as it has done.

Date: 2016-08-31 09:12 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] widgetfox.livejournal.com
Haven't read but now want to. In which order would you read them?

Date: 2016-09-01 08:08 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] widgetfox.livejournal.com
Thanks so much.

Date: 2016-08-31 11:20 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cybik.livejournal.com
I'm so glad you enjoyed it once again. It's such a good book. I might have to reread my very battered and loved copy for the nth time.

Date: 2016-09-01 09:40 am (UTC)
aunty_marion: (Stonehenge)
From: [personal profile] aunty_marion
Yes, it's one of my 'comfort' re-reads from time to time too. I'm so glad it continued to live up to your memory of it!

Date: 2016-09-01 04:36 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] lslaw.livejournal.com
See, now I feel bad, because you did own a copy, which you gave to me when you cleared out your shelves and then it went to the charity shop when I cleared out in turn. Embarrassingly I think it might have been one of the ones I didn't get around to reading because every time I was going to I got turned around about which to read first and I don't think there was a copy of The Hero and the Crown.

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