The Hero and the Crown, Robin McKinley
The Hero and the Crown, Robin McKinley
7 Rating(s)
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The Hero and the Crown

Author: Robin McKinley

Narrator: Roslyn Alexander

Unabridged: 10 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 01/18/2013


Synopsis

An outcast princess must earn her birthright as a hero of the realm—in this “utterly engrossing” Newbery Medal–winning fantasy (The New York Times).

Aerin 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.

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. 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. Aerin slips off alone to fetch her horse, her sword, and her fireproof ointment …

But modern dragons, while formidable opponents fully capable of killing a human being, are small and accounted vermin. There is no honor in killing dragons. The great dragons are a tale out of ancient history.

That is, until the day that the king is riding out at the head of an army. A weary man on an exhausted horse staggers into the courtyard where the king’s troop is assembled: “The Black Dragon has come … Maur, who has not been seen for generations, the last of the great dragons, great as a mountain. Maur has awakened."

About Robin McKinley

Robin McKinley has won various awards and citations for her writing, including the Newbery Medal for The Hero and the Crown, a Newbery Honor for The Blue Sword, and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature for Sunshine. Her other books include the New York Times bestseller Spindle's End; two novel-length retellings of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, Beauty and Rose Daughter; Deerskin, another novel-length fairy-tale retelling, of Charles Perrault's Donkeyskin; and a retelling of the Robin Hood legend, The Outlaws of Sherwood.


Reviews

Goodreads review by mark on June 12, 2014

First wave feminist novel The Hero and the Crown recognizes the intrinsic right for protagonist Aerin to have a say in the destiny of her country, regardless of her gender. Second wave feminist novel The Hero and the Crown illustrates how Aerin is the equal of any man in the patriarchal land of Damar......more

Goodreads review by Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽ on October 15, 2022

All the stars! The Hero and the Crown is one of those YA fantasies I have loved so deeply and for so long that I'm totally unable to view or rate it objectively. So you'll have to put up with some fangirling here. It won the Newbery Award in 1985. Aerin is a king's daughter, the heir and only child o......more

Goodreads review by Sean on June 19, 2007

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......more

Goodreads review by Sarah on February 19, 2018

Like most of Robin McKinley’s work, The Hero and the Crown is very hard to classify. Its surface is high fantasy—cliché high fantasy, even—but it’s written like psychologically-driven realistic fiction. Our setting is the rather desolate kingdom of Damar, about which we know little except: 1). The he......more

Goodreads review by Emily Michelle on November 08, 2010

This is the third Robin McKinley book I've read, and I've come to the conclusion that I just don't like her. I feel like this makes me a bad person--I mean, nobody doesn't like Robin McKinley--but although she writes beautifully about richly imagined worlds, I never like her characters. The Hero and......more