The Hero and the Crown Book

When I was a kid, I frequented two areas of the library: the children's section and the adult fiction section. The young adult shelves and the nonfiction shelves might as well have been made of glass for all I noticed them.

One year when I was in my early teens, the family was getting ready to go on the dreaded yearly camping trip. "Dreaded" because it meant a week in the outdoors, with no books. Well, almost no books: Mom's rule was that we each could take two'only two??'so we spent hours dawdling at the library making our choices. It was important to pick the perfect books, ones that could stand up to repeated readings, since we would almost certainly finish them for the first time on the ride up the canyon.

I looked all over the library for mine, or at least the part of the library I knew, and I couldn't find anything that had that coveted mix of exciting newness and safe, comfortable familiarity. In desperation, I finally walked over to the young adult section. And there it was: Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown, screaming, "Read me! Take me! Pick me!" And I did pick it, and I fell in love with it, and have loved it ever since.

Now, as anyone who has read Robin McKinley knows, this is actually the prequel to The Blue Sword, but when I finally read that book a few years later I was so disappointed that it wasn't The Hero and the Crown all over again that it took me a long while to really warm up to it. But it's good, too, though in a different way.