Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Before we moved out to Seattle, we decided to pick up some books for our trip. On long trips, we like to read each other stories out loud and we're always up for a good youth fiction or two. However, the bookstore was having a sale on all books so we suckered ourselves into buying a pile of books we would bring with us to Seattle. Never leave us alone in a bookstore, we'll end up getting SOMETHING.

Rebecca some months earlier had read Rose Daughter by Robin McKinley on the advice of my sister. She had liked the author's treatment of a classic fairy tale so we decided to pick up, rather blindly, three new books by Robin McKinley: her "trilogy" of sorts on magic. There really isn't much tying these three books together; it's more like a pair of books that are connected geographically and then a third that makes a one line mention of one of the other two. However, Hero and the Crown was a Newbery Medal winner and The Blue Sword was a Newbery Honor book, and we haven't ever been steered wrong by Newbery Awards.

So, the first book we read was The Blue Sword and a good thing too, because I felt it was the strongest of all three (but Rebecca's going to write about the other two books, so you can read her reviews later). The basic story is that Harry Crewe (a normal girl) lives in a world divided by the colonists and the mystical hillfolk. As a colonist girl, she's interested in what the mystical hillfolk are like, but until she actually meets one, doesn't realize the important part she's going to play in their struggle for survival. She gets kidnapped, she has lots of adventures and falls in love.

Sounds simple, yet with an infusion of "interesting" magic, this book was really absorbing for me. I have a problem with a lot of so-called magic books in that the author uses magic as a literary device to get themselves out of an authoring "corner". I don't want the characters to be able to use magic in their worst predicaments and magic solves everything. In the Blue Sword, I see a very realistic magic which the characters don't know how to control.

This book was fun to read and we both really cared for the characters. Even after we arrived in Seattle, we spent every night reading in this book until we got to the end. Without being cliche, read this book: it's very good.