Dragonhaven Review

[dressagegrrrl]

Book: Dragonhaven
Author: Robin McKinley

My thoughts:In my opinion, Robin McKinley's greatest strength as a writer is her ability to make the mundane magical or portentous. Her voice is lyric and moving. She used it very successfully to elevate some of her more prosaic, slower-moving books from uninspired to elegant. Her voice is what saved both

Comments

Re: hmm

[dressagegrrrl]

Oh, I completely agree with you. That she was able to maintain that through the entire book speaks of a skill beyond ordinary writers. It just didn't work for me.

Robin McKinley made a post on her blog that says she wishes some readers could distinguish between "this book didn't work for me" and "this book sucks bears."

This book is amazingly written.

It just did not work for me. :(

Re: hmm

[dressagegrrrl]

Oh, and re the plotline. It was well-done, but I thought that it dragged in parts.

Re: hmm

[phoenixfalls]

I agree completely. Jake really does talk like the teenage boys I have known (and I babysit on the side, so I have known quite a few even since I stopped being a teenage girl). His voice should have grown in the epilogue as you said (see Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy series for a series that accomplishes this beautifully) but it is still really impressive how well the tone is maintained. Unfortunately, it is also true that it can be very off-putting. Sunshine was like this for me as well; there again, the first-person narration is very definitely the narrator speaking instead of Robin McKinley. And like everyone else whose review I've read of this so far, it did make the book harder to love. But c'mon. There's dragons. Dragons are why I got into fantasy so many years ago. And very few authors make the dragons real while still being dragons. The way she portrays animals (real and interesting and still animals but not "just" animals) is one of the things I have loved the most about Robin McKinley's books since I discovered The