Shadows

by Robin McKinley

[ladygrey]

I liked that this was a really unique world of magic. Eventually it kind of felt like a very sort of accurate version of what the world would look like if our history had contained magic and this is what it had become. But it also felt like the world was just opening up and becoming more interesting at the end.

It some ways a lot of things were every familiar because I've read a lot of [author:Robin McKinley] and so magic will give you headaches and there will be lots of animals that help and also either a dog or a horse that's the heroine's best friend. And the heroine will refuse to accept that she's special and possibly even that she's magical. But this story was much less abstract than some of her other climaxes (like [book:Spindle's End] and [book:Sunshine]) and there was good, solid resolution after the big battle so it ended well.

I think the thing I missed the most was that I didn't love the characters. I didn't dislike them and they all changed in interesting ways. But I didn't love them so I was never really pulled into the story so much that I had to keep reading. And also the romance. I think it's hard, sometimes, to be true to real life in a book. In real life it makes perfect sense that you'd want to be with the person you'd been friends with for years once you see them in that new light instead of the new shiny person you don't have that history with. But the reader doesn't have the life history of the characters, we've only got the book history of the past 150 pages. And it's Robin McKinley so if course the heroine thinks the new shiny guy only wants to be with her because he thinks she's special - not because he actually sees her and likes her. I thought she was just being annoying for an entire chapter. It wasn't until the end I realized she was actually right. And all the memories we were given didn't endear me to the love interest and didn't generate any affection in me. I understood the appeal to the new shiny guy and then he was out without a second thought and I never got the appeal of his replacement as a reader, even though I could see why the character would make that choice. If that makes sense. Also a couple of the characters are written with their sort of foreign accents so the grammar is messed up which is also authentic, but really just awkward and uncomfortable to read.

I think I would have liked to have seen the other side of this story - the part that started in the last bit with all the different magic workers and what other characters were doing with their magic.