![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
50bookchallenge, 15000pages
Jul. 1st, 2007 11:49 pmBook #49 -- Robin McKinley, Dragonhaven, 333pages
This is one of the ARCs I literally squealed over, the other being the new De Lint, because I *love* Robin McKinley and didn't even know she was publishing a new book. So of course it was one of the first that I started to read. At first I was a little disappointed. It just didn't grab me the way I expected her work to do. Part of it was the narrator, a teenaged boy, who was trying to tell the story of how he found and raised an orphaned dragon. He's writing this to an 'audience' made up of people who have been watching this saga unfold in their media for years -- how the mother dragon killed the poacher who fatally wounded her. How the rich family of the poacher was lobbying to have the dragon preserve shut down and all the dragons killed as dangerous animals. How everyone who works at the preserve, *especially* the Director's son, is not quite right in the head, and that poor boy should be taken away for his own good. So he's writing this to tell his side of the story to an audience that he imagines to be skeptical at best, and likely downright hostile. So he spends a lot of time equivocating, and explaining, and giving excuses, and apologising every few sentences for the unbelievable things he's asking you to accept. Which is actually all very realistic, given the character and his assumed audience. But it got on my nerves. I'm reading from the perspective of a fantasy lover who is all too willing to suspend her disbelief if the narrator would just stop apologising and let her suspend it!
Nonetheless, the events are engaging, once you get past the narrative style, and I was doing well on a chapter or so a day, until this evening I hit this point and this thing happened and then I needed to read the whole rest of it *right now* which is why I'm still awake at midnight when I have to go to work tomorrow. And near the end, the narration leaves off and picks up five years later, and a lot of the annoying tone is gone, which just goes to show that McKinley was doing a wonderful job of channelling a teenaged boy, annoyances and all. It really is a brilliant book, with a lot to say about current environmental policy, since really the only thing different about McKinley's world from ours is that a few animals we consider extinct or imaginary actually exist in her world, albeit in threatened populations. And the end actually made me cry because it was all so *right* and *hopeful* and that rarely happens. So yes, despite the rocky start, the book is *definitely* worth picking up when it comes out, which will be in September.
Progress toward goals: 183/365 = 50.1%
Books: 49/50 = 98%
Pages: 16206/15000 = 108.0%
2007 Book List
cross-posted to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
50bookchallenge, 15000pages, and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gwynraven
This is one of the ARCs I literally squealed over, the other being the new De Lint, because I *love* Robin McKinley and didn't even know she was publishing a new book. So of course it was one of the first that I started to read. At first I was a little disappointed. It just didn't grab me the way I expected her work to do. Part of it was the narrator, a teenaged boy, who was trying to tell the story of how he found and raised an orphaned dragon. He's writing this to an 'audience' made up of people who have been watching this saga unfold in their media for years -- how the mother dragon killed the poacher who fatally wounded her. How the rich family of the poacher was lobbying to have the dragon preserve shut down and all the dragons killed as dangerous animals. How everyone who works at the preserve, *especially* the Director's son, is not quite right in the head, and that poor boy should be taken away for his own good. So he's writing this to tell his side of the story to an audience that he imagines to be skeptical at best, and likely downright hostile. So he spends a lot of time equivocating, and explaining, and giving excuses, and apologising every few sentences for the unbelievable things he's asking you to accept. Which is actually all very realistic, given the character and his assumed audience. But it got on my nerves. I'm reading from the perspective of a fantasy lover who is all too willing to suspend her disbelief if the narrator would just stop apologising and let her suspend it!
Nonetheless, the events are engaging, once you get past the narrative style, and I was doing well on a chapter or so a day, until this evening I hit this point and this thing happened and then I needed to read the whole rest of it *right now* which is why I'm still awake at midnight when I have to go to work tomorrow. And near the end, the narration leaves off and picks up five years later, and a lot of the annoying tone is gone, which just goes to show that McKinley was doing a wonderful job of channelling a teenaged boy, annoyances and all. It really is a brilliant book, with a lot to say about current environmental policy, since really the only thing different about McKinley's world from ours is that a few animals we consider extinct or imaginary actually exist in her world, albeit in threatened populations. And the end actually made me cry because it was all so *right* and *hopeful* and that rarely happens. So yes, despite the rocky start, the book is *definitely* worth picking up when it comes out, which will be in September.
Progress toward goals: 183/365 = 50.1%
Books: 49/50 = 98%
Pages: 16206/15000 = 108.0%
2007 Book List
cross-posted to
50bookchallenge, 15000pages, and gwynraven
