Snag The Door In The Hedge Depicted By Robin McKinley Accessible In Publication
McKinley writes a mean fairy tale, whether she's reworking an old classic "The Twelve Dancing Princesses," "The Princess and the Frog", "The Golden Hind" or writing her own "The Stolen Princess".
I love how atmospheric these stories are: you step into each story slowly until you're fully submerged, almost ensorcelled yourself.
The characters and their histories are fleshed out well beyond the scope of the original fairy tales.
The soldier in "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" becomes an old campaigner who can't go back to his old life the court in "The Princess and the Frog" has a powerful visitor who has overstayed his welcome.
The women are all still as beautiful as the moon and the men are all stalwart and true, but I'd be willing to attribute that to the fairy tales, rather than to McKinley.
The only consistent weakness in the stories was plotrelated, It's most apparent in "The Golden Hind," But ultimately, the stories are so wellwritten that I didn't really mind, These stories are such a lush joy to experience, The retelling of thedancing princesses in particular is my favorite version of that story ever it has a glittery, dark undertone to it that gives it much more depth.
This was a nice set of fairy tales, told in a classic style, I enjoyed it! Gave up a dozen pages into the second story,
Unfortunately these novellas were nothing like McKinleys sitelinkRose Daughter, which I really liked, Maybe she learned her craft on them, Maybe who knows
Too much telling, too little empathy, Not so much bad as not engaging,
Don't waste your time,
It's Robin McKinley, so it is, of course, beautifully written with a caveat I'll get to in a moment.
It's in the fairytale genre, so you need to be willing to accept that princes and princesses are nearly all wise, beautiful, good, brave, and kind.
There is one commoner protagonist, but the rest are all royal, and noble in both senses of the word.
You also need to be able to accept that marrying people off to other people who they've never spent any time with is a reasonable thing to do, and that in at least one case the woman's consent is not particularly required for this.
Leave your feminism, as well as your Marxism, if any, at the door, You could blame the source genre, but, . . eh. The author managed to give a female protagonist plenty of agency in The Blue Sword.
I found the king offering his daughters up as prizes hard to forgive,
My other gripe is about the semicolons, An occasional semicolon is fine it shows that two thoughts are linked together more tightly than two separate sentences would convey.
But when the vast majority of your sentences include a semicolon I am not exaggerating far more sentences have one than lack one, and not a few of them contain two semicolons, at that point it's moved beyond a stylistic choice, and has gone all the way past an annoying tic to become an outright fault in the writing.
If none of those three issues bother you too much, these are beautifully told or retold stories by a highly capable author.
To start off, I absolutely love Robin McKinley's books, So, when I saw this, I thought that I would love it, Well, needless to say, I didn't end up loving it, Or liking it for that matter, The book, consisting of four short stories two original, two redone classics was awful, More than half of the description of the characters was purple prose, The characters also turned out to be a bunch of Mary Sue's and Gary Stu's, The description of everything else in the story places and buildings, etc was very detailed, and not in a good way.
McKinley went off topic describing things so many times that I often found myself thinking 'Wait WHAT' There is also very little dialogue.
I am greatly disappointed with Robin when it comes to this book, This is a collection of some of McKinleys shorter works, Two are tellings of wellknown fairy tales, “The Princess and the Frog” and “The Twelve Dancing Princesses”, and the other two were stories I was not familiar with beforehand, but was equally enchanted with after reading.
McKinley has a gift with language, and its a pleasure to read her prose, Her deft hands means that the familiar stories are read in new ways, and the new stories feel just as timeless.
“The Stolen Princess” was a look at faerieland and changelings I hadnt read before and particularly enjoyed.
Its alright. Ive read better. I know theyre fairytales, but I wish she would have given the women more agency, The originals werent bad in that respect, but none of the princesses speak in thedancing princesses and thats not fair to me.
A Door in the Hedge by Robin McKinley is a small collection of short stories, There arestories total,new stories andstories retold, My favorite was the first, The Stolen Princess one of the new stories, She completely draws you in and before you know it, you have finished the book, I couldn't put it down, I figured that I would read a story here and there, but that didn't happen, It's the same with all her books, I finish them before I want to, I am in the process of buying up all her books so that I can read them again and again.
And maybe this sounds morbid, but I am glad that she isn't dead so that she can keep writing more.
I love Jane Austen but it saddens me that she died so young when she could have and would have written many more books that I am sure I would love as much as her existing ones.
This book includes four short stories:
The Stolen princess,stars
The Princess and the Frogstars, the story was just too short!
The Hunting of the Hindstars.
.
The Twelve Dancing Princesses,stars
Okay i'll admit that a three star rating for Robin Mckinley writing is absurd.
She's one of the great ones able to transport me to magical worlds, with her beautiful smooth writing.
I guess these short stories are told in the classical/traditional fairy tale way, and after having read so many fairy tales retellings i can't help comparing this one, with other tales i've read.
. . namely sitelinkWildwood Dancing. A retelling of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses"/ "Princess and the Frog" fairy tales, Which i guess is unfair, . .
For those who like "classical" fairy tales with love at first sight, . no character development, and things like that i think you'll enjoy this quite a lot, For others who have been "spoiled" by a certain modernization that has rewritten today retellings of fairy tales, this will probably rank a little lower.
despite the beautiful writing.
April: sitelink.on Kindle I don't know what to say about this book, It was boring. I really struggled with it, I really like books full of short stories, I really do, but the stories in this one were WAY too short.
Robin McKinley tends to wander off in la la land, and doesn't ever get to the point.
I feel like she tried to cram too many events into too short a time frame, In the first story, I wasn't quite clear on what the actual problem was, I liked the characters, I thought the story had potential until princess Linadel disappeared, Then it went downhill from there, The second story was WAY too short, it lasted about ten pages, Most of it the princess is fretting about how to solve her problems, and then all of a sudden, on the last page, Poof, she magically knows a solution.
The third story wandered too much, I mostly just skimmed it, It gave too much description on things that needed it and not enough description on things that did i.
e. what the golden hind actually IS, The last story, I was not impressed with at all, The twelve dancing princesses is one of my favorite fairytales, and Robin McKinley ruined it, I did not have the patience to even finish it, I was NOT impressed with this book, and this is last time I will attempt to read a Robin McKinley book just because a lot of people say its good.
Four slim classic fairytales retold well, but without the spark of creativity that makes McKinley's fantasy special.
The Princess and the Frog came closest, with names and motivation, but was so slight as to make little impression.
The Twelve Dancing Princesses especially is an odd, forlorn tale I'd have liked to see made richer.
These fairytale royalty are archetypes, not characters, and McKinley is usually very good at making characters out of outlines.
A collection of four stories, all in an exquisite enchanting prose style, She has the voice down pat, it can draw you in on its own,
Two are retellings, one of "The Frog Princess" and the other of "The Twelve Dancing Princess," in which elements are added that shift the significance of events in the tale.
I think the second is my favorite of this,
There's also an original tale about the fairies the Fair Folk and the last mortal land, where the fairies take infant boys and maidens nearly old enough to marry.
And the royal family of that land,
And the fourth one also has some fairy tale elements, a magical hind in the woods, but I think it's the weakest of the four.
Oh how I adore McKinley's writing although I do have to admit that I prefer her longer stories to these shorter ones even though these stories were very good as well.
The Stolen Princess was about changelings, . . er, almost as the fae kind of stole a kid from a family boys in their infancy, girls in their late teens, but didn't quite give a child in return.
One of the kids who gets taken in the middle of the night is a princess as the story's name indicates.
Both the premise and execution were really good BUT the story didn't quite resonate with me as I would've liked to.
My least favourite story was actually the the first story in this collection The Stolen Princess.
It was good, but I have to say that the second story The Princess and the Frog stole my heart and that story was definitely way too short.
I would usually say that The Princess and the Frog is one of my least favourite fairy tales but McKinley's version was awesome and I was left wanting a story at least three times as long.
The third story The Hunting of the
Hind was also really good and I think if McKinley had written more, it could've been magnificent.
But what I really liked about this story was the fact that the savior of the day was a princess noone actually seemed to believe in.
And the last story The Twelve Dancing Princesses is a story that I've always liked about princesses who dance away their dancing shoes in the middle of the night.
McKinley's version was also really good but I think I kind of prefer the original to this one.
All in all, a very pleasant reading experience,
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