Honey in my Coffee

A quick entry before I go to work today- (This, of course, is now a complete lie. I started this entry on Sunday, found that I didn't actually have enough time to finish it before I had to leave for work, and have only now gotten back to it. You may continue.)

A few weeks ago, I read Chalice by Robin McKinley. I meant to put up something about it when I finished reading, but, as usual, I got distracted and forgot.

Let me start by saying that Robin is my favorite author of all time. It was actually her novels that made me interested in books in the first place. Well, I had always been interested, and really wanted to love books, but hadn't quite found the right one, yet. My sister has always been a fanatical reader, and I, who believed she walked on water, wanted to love them for her sake. She just seemed so cool to me (still does, really) and I thought that books must also, therefore, be cool since she spent so much time with them. Unfortunately, most of the books I had read up till then (I read RM's book in fifth grade) seemed to talk down to me. I wanted to be treated like an adult, someone capable of understanding complicated concepts. Also, I kept finding books where the girls stood around and waited to be saved while the boys went tearing off, sword in hand, having all sorts of wonderful adventures. It was very discouraging. Then I found The Blue Sword. My fifth grade teacher tried to keep me from reading it, so I knew it must be something wonderful.

"It's actually a very difficult book. Everyone wants to read it because of the flashy cover, but most kids your age struggle with it."

Luckily, I was just as stubborn then as I am now. He relented, and I started reading.

Finally, I thought as I read, someone who thinks the way I do.

I didn't find it difficult at all, and finished it much faster than I had any other novel previously.

Next, I read The Hero and the Crown. And everything else since then. I reread The Blue Sword every year, and still find nooks and crannies in McKinley's world that are worth exploring.

So, with that very long introduction, I bring you to Chalice.

It's a beautiful story set in a world of unfamiliar mythology and rules. At the heart of the story is a beekeeper who has become the Chalice, an important figure in the health and harmony of her land and people. And the land needs her. It has been treated badly, and left on the brink of destruction. To add to the chaos, the new Master is not entirely human, but a being who could harm his subjects with but a brush of the hand. They make an unlikely pair, but together they are trying to save this land that they love from becoming a pawn in the larger government's chess game.

RM has a way with language that is almost like poetry, and this book is no exception. Her characters are always interesting because they are never perfect. Very rarely, in fact, are they even attractive. At the most, she will say that their faces light up with intelligence, which is it's own kind of beauty.

I prefer her flawed heroines to the ones in other novels who are absolutely beautiful, amazingly clever, perfectly good and entirely unrelatable (which, apparently, is not a word, but it ought to be, so I'm NOT changing it. Take that spell-check! Boo-Yah!).

Anyway, all of this is true of Chalice, and I did enjoy reading the book, but it's not my favorite. For some reason, I felt like I only got part of the story. Perhaps it's only because I read it so quickly, but most of her novels have a nice roomy quality to them, and this one seemed slightly empty. She dropped us into the middle of the story at the beginning, and then the ending felt sort of squashed.

It did, however, make me go out somewhere in the middle and buy a jar of honey. There's a great deal of honey in this book (she is a beekeeper, after all) and you can only read about people eating honey (on toast, on porridge, straight out of the jar...) for so long before you start to crave it yourself. I even put honey in my coffee one morning. It was good. Gave my coffee a sort of wild flavor. Magic coffee. All coffee is magic, really. Liquid crack, it is. Mmmm. Cooooffeeeee.

Sorry, where was I?

Oh right, I was finishing up this post.

See you next time!

Jules