the hero and the crown by robin mckinley

It doesn’t help that Aerin shows no signs of magic, unlike all others in the royal family. Courtiers and villagers alike claim she is half-witch – for how could her father, the King, have married the enemy? He must have been enchanted. The Hero and the Crown tells us the story of Aerin, a young girl, a princess if you will, who is followed by rumours.

What I do not comprehend, is how I hadn’t heard of The Hero and the Crown earlier. I mean, it has an amazing female protagonist who is unafraid to follow her heart regardless of the opinions of others, a beautiful prose, and dragons. It doesn’t take much to understand why this is such a beloved children’s/YA book.

Maur, who has not been seen for generations, the last of the great dragons, great as a mountain. A weary man on an exhausted horse staggers into the courtyard where the king’s troop is assembled: “The Black Dragon has come. That is, until the day that the king is riding out at the head of an army. The great dragons are a tale out of ancient history. īut modern dragons, while formidable opponents fully capable of killing a human being, are small and accounted vermin. Aerin slips off alone to fetch her horse, her sword, and her fireproof ointment.

Two years, many canter circles to the left to strengthen Talat’s weak leg, and many burnt twigs (and a few fingers) secretly experimenting with the ointment recipe later, Aerin is present when someone comes from an outlying village to report a marauding dragon to the king. She makes friends with her father’s lame, retired warhorse, Talat, and discovers an old, overlooked, and dangerously imprecise recipe for dragon-fire-proof ointment in a dusty corner of her father’s library. In Robin McKinley’s Newbery Medal–winning novel, an outcast princess must earn her birthright as a hero of the realmĪerin is an outcast in her own father’s court, daughter of the foreign woman who, it was rumored, was a witch, and enchanted the king to marry her.

The hero and the crown by robin mckinley