Reading: The Book of Three

[white_hart]

I loved Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain when I was seven or eight years old. I had never re-read them as an adult, but was prompted to pick the first one, The Book of Three, up this week partly because Lucy Mangan's Bookworm had made me think about the books I loved as a child and partly because there was a meme going around in the run-up to the royal wedding about not having dreamt of being a princess as a little girl, and I remembered while I mostly didn't want to be a princess there were some princesses who were worthy of aspiration; Princess Leia, obviously, but also Eilonwy from Alexander's books.

Re-reading it now, I can definitely see why I loved the books as a child. And there is still a lot to like; there's a lot of humour, the interactions between the characters felt realistic and Eilonwy is as delightful as I remembered her. On the downside, Tolkien's influence is very, very obvious; I suspect that's part of why I liked them so much at the time, given how obsessed I was with Lord of the Rings in those days, but now it feels a bit too derivative in parts. Taran's assumption of leadership, when he's just a boy who clearly doesn't have much of a clue about anything, also annoyed me quite a bit, and the plot is fairly thin and even though the book is very short I felt it dragged a bit in places. However, it's held up a lot better than some of my other childhood favourites (Madeleine L'Engle, I'm looking at you) and I may well go on to re-read the rest of the series.

Comments

[mountainkiss]

I loved these books a lot.

[lilliburlero]

I loved them as a kid, though on an adult re-read I had the same difficulties as you with formula. Somehow I actually went on to read Welsh mythology-based fantasy like The Owl Service and translations of the Mabinogion without too much dissonance though there was a 'wow, Alexander really did a hell of a PR job on Gwydion' moment.

[white_hart]

I think I may have read The Owl Service before these (I must re-read it sometime, I'm sure it will make a hell of a lot more sense than it did when I was seven...) I did get a Penguin Classics version of the Mabinogion a few years later but by that time I'd forgotten enough of the details of Prydain not to have much dissonance either.