Book completed
Apr. 17th, 2026 03:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeThe Blue Sword, by Robin McKinley. In a world rather like that of our own, Harry has had to move from her green and comfortable home (think, “Victorian Britain”) to a desert land, where her people are the colonizers, eager to extract the land’s resources (think, “Iran, but with hardly any people”). She finds herself kidnapped by an otherwise honorable local man and ends up having adventures, which sometimes involve some magic. I’ve read this book a few times before, and its prequel, and I like them very much. There are two quirks to the writing style that I remember well – Harry’s horse has names in two languages, so the author more or less alternates, such that the horse can be “Sungold” and “Tsornin” in the same paragraph. The other is that from time to time another character’s point of view appears, just for a paragraph or two, but it’s not jarring.
One element that reminds me that this is very much a fantasy world is that Harry often finds herself sleeping in proximity to a man – or living and working with a man for weeks on end – and there is NO suggestion that this is in any way uncomfortable for her or him. The men always treat her with the same respect they would treat another man, and there is zero innuendo or even any physical awareness at all, beyond how one would see a friend or peer. Amazing.
One element that reminds me that this is very much a fantasy world is that Harry often finds herself sleeping in proximity to a man – or living and working with a man for weeks on end – and there is NO suggestion that this is in any way uncomfortable for her or him. The men always treat her with the same respect they would treat another man, and there is zero innuendo or even any physical awareness at all, beyond how one would see a friend or peer. Amazing.
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