Today on Classic Fantasy: The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley review

Bring back the fighting princess classics

April 18, 2025

Categorization: Fantasy

Where read: On old paperbacks

Picture the late nineties – early 2000’s. What a time to be alive. I had just set my new Nokia to play "Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears as my ringtone. I was twelve-ish years old and wandering around a scholastic book fair (good times!) when I stumble across The Blue Sword by one heretofore-unknown-to-me Robin McKinley. Seeing as the book was about eight dollars (thank you scholastic book fairs!), my mother was willing to buy it for me, and I took it home, grabbed a can of sour cream Pringles, and started in. Entirely unsuspecting that I was about to enter a seminal moment of my young adult Fantasy experience.

As an aside, I have a mini goblin gripe about the tagging of fantasy books as “young adult” by the general public or by reviewers, implying that certain books are only suitable for teenagers and must be disdained by more mature “serious” readers. This is a load of horse crap. Good Fantasy is Good Fantasy, end of story. The “young adult” tag’s sole purpose is for physical bookstores (remember those?) to simplify how to sort physical books into specific shelves dedicated to what is appropriate for certain ages, much like how movies and TV have a G, PG, R etc. rating classification for viewers.

OK fine, carrying the discussion into the modern day, when, you know, my iPhone plays this annoying nonsense tune when someone calls me instead of the hit song of the week (we have moved backwards in so many ways, I swear to God), I suppose the "YA" tag can also help parents who don’t want to read the books first Google-search what Fantasy books they can give to their pre-pubescent children.

(getting more and more into my Elder Goblin stride) in fact, I don’t think I like how fantasy books are tagged at all by reviewers nowadays. I don’t like the tags “romantasy” or “cottage-core” (wtf does that even mean?) as if they should only appeal to a certain demographic of “lovers of ‘cottage-core’ or ‘romantasy’”. Again, good Fantasy is good Fantasy, end of story. Good Fantasy should not be pigeonholed into trendy clickbaity categories, lest they are overlooked by people who don’t necessarily think they would like ‘romantasy’ or ‘cottage-core’, but who do love good Fantasy. Like me.

I mean, I don’t know anymore. It could be that authors actually want their books to be tagged with these labels to increase readership. But I don’t see how the specific readership base these tags would be aimed at and thus the potential market for their books would be bigger than the market of People Who Love Good Fantasy (see this goblin’s note below this post though).

Anyway, where was I.

As I said in this post here, The Blue Sword is going to be required reading for my kids when they turn twelve in mental age, and they are no doubt going to love me for it. This book is terrific fun, an adventure by a diffident heroine to worlds unknown and to the discovery of the amazing things she is capable of. It is like a shorter and much less violent version of Frank Herbert’s Dune.

I loved this book so much that I went to my little local bookstore (I talk about it here) to special-order what I saw was the prequel to this book, The Hero and the Crown, which had apparently been written in 1984 and was, even in the early 2000's, no longer in general circulation in your average bookstore.

Which is wrong and an absolute shame, because The Hero and the Crown is a Fantasy classic that should never be forgotten. I have read few books since that have so much power and wonder in them in such a concise little novel. Let me just say here that Robin McKinley back in 1984 pioneered the “rebellious princess” or "fighting princess" Fantasy concept that everyone knows and loves until this day. Nowadays, the Disney movies have Elsa in Frozen, Merida in Brave, Netflix has the film Damsel, but before all these and so many more, there was Aerin.

Some spoilers alert, but know that I have a very low threshold of what constitutes a spoiler, as I like to come into things absolutely blind as to the plot, characters, everything except the genre.

Aerin (isn't that a beautiful name? I have always loved this name) is the princess of a magical world bristling with secrets. She has no concept of her power, only knows that she doesn’t fit in, and must forge her own destiny to discover who she is and to save her kingdom from the evil creeping into it. Her adventure is long and hard and exciting, and the ending is sweet and complex and hopeful and sad all at the same time; it stays with you long after you have closed the book. It is an adult ending that a pre-teenager can understand. I don’t know whether Robin McKinley had a specific target audience age in mind when she wrote this book (and The Blue Sword), but you will find that the book does not pander to the younger demographic.

The plot may sound simple but this book is so beautifully written that it remains a standout to this day. It reads like the personal journal of a lonely heroine-in-the-making, trying to find her place in the world and the courage to do what she needs to do. Aerin is resourceful and intelligent and shy and brave and human and she is a fighting princess with long fiery red hair, she is basically everything a teenage girl wants to be and more.

Upon reflection, I see that this is basically why I was obsessed with this book as a pre-teenager, and why it gave me so much comfort to read over and over again. I remember being a pre-teenager, somewhat. It is a lonesome, confusing age. My friends were dicks and I always felt like I had to pretend to be a different person around them, I never told my mom any of my problems (eeew), my body was changing, I hated school (the thought of organized education to this day gives me the "ick" – did I say that right?), and my Nokia phone was always running out of prepaid load. Reading books like The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword gave me the courage to be myself and encouraged me to believe that who I was was good enough, and were my solace whenever it all became too much.

If there are any parents reading this, if you have or will have pubescent kids who are going through these sorts of personal predicaments, trust me, you might never know (and in the off chance you do find out it will probably in some horrible way, like through the internet or Facebook). The kids are most likely not going to tell you.

You can’t solve problems that you don’t know. You can give your kids books about fighting princesses that will show them that they can be brave enough to face them, though. And you can't do better than these fighting princess classics.

*Note for fans of “cottage-core” – While I still hate the tag, in the interest of reminding the general public that Robin McKinley’s work deserves not to be lost in the annals of Fantasy history, she wrote a book called “Spindle’s End” that I grudgingly think fits into this tag. This Sleeping Beauty retelling was not my favorite book of hers, but it was a fun read. And for those like me who don’t care about tags, this book is Good Fantasy.