I really liked them for four big reasons. The first is that I am a musical kind of woman, and especially the magical panpipes really appealed to me as a flute player (yes, Ocarina of Time was my favorite video game as a kid, why do you ask?). Also, depressed Lirael was a lot like young depressed Fish. And she sought refuge in the library, just like me. Then there was the fact that there were all those morbid elements in an otherwise high fantasy. That was the first time I had seen that. And I loved, loved, that Sabriel and Touchstone didn't stop being awesome and heroic just because they got married and had kids, which I was getting really sick of in YA fantasy. The main character in my current novel has a kid. Her mother is a central heroic figure. I want girls to have stories that tell them they can grow up, get married, and have kids, and still be the center of their own story.
Harry potter fandom is where I first discovered porn, at the tender age of fourteen. I think that explains a lot.
Prydain were not my favorite of Alexander's books, and I think they really show some of his real weaknesses as an author. It took him a really long time to get women and girls. I like his later works, especially the Westmark Trilogy much better.
My favorite Robin McKinley book, closely followed by The Hero and the Crown, was The Outlaws of Sherwood. However, I didn't much like The Blue Sword when I read it, for two reasons. The first was that middle school me saw Corlath as a sotr of father figure for Harry, and when they ended up together, I was squicked hard. The second, and more important in retrospect was that there were things that kept hitting me as wrong or off, and as I got older, all of them would strike me as playing more than a bit into the "mighty whitey" and "noble savage" narratives. I'm proud of my twelve year old self for realizing something wasn't right, even if I didn't know what.
There's this novel I wrote in eighth and ninth grade, 500 handwritten pages (and my handwriting was small) that I occasionally pull down and read to reflect on how far I've come (and how much worse my handwriting got. Wow) and now that I look back on it, I can see just how much of an Inu Yasha/Abhorsen trilogy crossover it is. Hmm.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2013-01-29 05:36 pm (UTC)Harry potter fandom is where I first discovered porn, at the tender age of fourteen. I think that explains a lot.
Prydain were not my favorite of Alexander's books, and I think they really show some of his real weaknesses as an author. It took him a really long time to get women and girls. I like his later works, especially the Westmark Trilogy much better.
My favorite Robin McKinley book, closely followed by The Hero and the Crown, was The Outlaws of Sherwood. However, I didn't much like The Blue Sword when I read it, for two reasons. The first was that middle school me saw Corlath as a sotr of father figure for Harry, and when they ended up together, I was squicked hard. The second, and more important in retrospect was that there were things that kept hitting me as wrong or off, and as I got older, all of them would strike me as playing more than a bit into the "mighty whitey" and "noble savage" narratives. I'm proud of my twelve year old self for realizing something wasn't right, even if I didn't know what.
There's this novel I wrote in eighth and ninth grade, 500 handwritten pages (and my handwriting was small) that I occasionally pull down and read to reflect on how far I've come (and how much worse my handwriting got. Wow) and now that I look back on it, I can see just how much of an Inu Yasha/Abhorsen trilogy crossover it is. Hmm.