I like Robin McKinley’s imagination and creativity. But the Blue Sword is still her best.

Well, I liked some of the stories, especially the first one about the mute girl. The buttercup story was sweet. Not a lot of conflict, just chicken soup for the fairy-tale-lover's soul. Those were 4-5 stars. The others, not so much.

From a distance, the troll story reads more like a horror movie in the making: Kidnapping a baby, grooming her for her adoptive (adult) brother-beast, and keeping her isolated from the rest of the world (including erasing her family's memory of her) so that, when given the illusion of freedom, she can't function and has nowhere else to go.... And call me a prude, but the implication of bestiality in (with) The Stagman left my pearls clutched and nose wrinkled.

This was the second time I enjoyed this book. The first time as an ebook, this time as an audiobook.
"The Healer" - 3 star, how a mute healer got healed.
"The Stagman" - 2 star, a victim of a villainous uncle got saved by a wizard (Luthe from Damar series) and a prince. The climax didn't feel like a climax and the ending was rather abrupt (the development of the relationship of the heroine with the man she chose wasn't shown).
"Touk's House" - 4 star, a girl taken by a witch from birth and a troll ended up happily ever after.
"Buttercups" - 5 star, the story and the romance were more engaging than the others, and the ending was satisfying.
"A Knot in the Grain" - 4 star, the MC was engaging. It was set in modern time and the fantasy element wasn't obvious at first. The ending could be more satisfying.

Five short stories that kept my interest. The first story a baby is born that has no voice and becomes a healer. The second The Stagman is about a girl who is the rightful queen but is kept away by a mean uncle, but rescued by a Stagman. There is another one about a troll, a story about buttercup farm and the last was the knot in the grain (about a box found in the attic). I enjoyed it.

Robin McKinley takes magic out of fairy tales once-upon-a-time and brings it right into your living room. In the blink of an eye, it changes from something scary and powerful to a good—and helpful—friend. She’s the best!

4 5 star stories and the last story was a flop. WTH? A story about a girl who decides to ignore magic. It was like when Susan Pevensie decided to grow up and forget Narnia.

I have always loved fairy-tales, and I have enjoyed McKinley's various attempts at re-telling both some old beloved and forgotten ones. I enjoyed more, however, these original tales by McKinley. She has a lovely facility for creating worlds of fantasy and wonder, and I especially enjoyed revisiting an old friend, Luthe, the mage, in a couple of these stories. I was especially taken by the last, title, story that was set in a modern world. I was so caught up in the set up of the story that I dismayed at the quickly diminishing number of pages left in the book. Indeed if I have one recurring complaint about McKinley's stories, it is that they sometimes end too soon and abruptly.

Full review first posted on www.FantasyLiterature.com:

I’m not sure if I bought this fantasy short story collection by Robin McKinley when I first saw it in the mid-1990s because McKinley was one of my favorite fantasy authors or because I was entranced by the cover art on the paperback, with the colorful contrast between the girl in a brilliant sapphire dress and the bright gold background of buttercups. Actually, at that time I was pretty much automatically buying everything McKinley wrote. Regardless, I very much enjoyed the collection of five fantasy short stories, and have reread them several times since. These tales are set in different lands and, for the most part, different worlds, but they are bound together by the fantasy element and their young women protagonists. As a whole, I rate this collection 4 stars, but I’ve given each story its own rating below.

“Healer” is set in same fantasy world as Damar, the desert land explored more deeply in The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown. Lily, a gifted healer apprentice, has been mute since birth, and feels some bitterness toward her inability to communicate. When she is twenty, she meets Sahath, a jaded wizard who has lost almost all of his powers, but retains the ability to mindspeak. Lily is entranced with him, the first person she has ever been able to truly communicate with, although her teacher and friend Jolin fears him:

What, she asked herself in fear, might this man do to her, in her innocence, her pleasure in the opening of a door so long closed to her, and open now only to this stranger? Mages were not to be trusted on a human scale of right and wrong, reason and unreason. Mages were sworn to other things. Jolin understood that they were sworn to ― goodness, to rightness; but often that goodness was of a high, far sort that looked very much like misery to the smaller folk who had to live near it.

When Sahath offers to take Lily to his old master, the great mage, to see if he can give Lily her voice, all three ― Jolin, Lily and Sahath ― must face their fears.

The quiet pace of this story fits its subject matter; not just Lily’s physical silence, but also Sahath’s slowly learning to love and hope again. For readers who love the character of Luthe and the world of Damar, it’s also a pleasure to revisit them again, however briefly. 3.5 stars.

*****

In “The Stagman,” the princess Ruen has been raised in the shadow of her uncle, who became Regent over their kingdom when Ruen’s parents died. Her uncle is a man who has grasped power and does not wish to relinquish it to Ruen. So he isolates her, with no friends or family or even servants that she can rely on, and sees to it that she is given only instructions and lessons that are too difficult to comprehend. Ruen grows up passive, dazed and inadequate.

On Ruen’s name day when she is supposed to be named queen, her uncle announces that magical portents warn against it. Instead Ruen is left chained to stones outside the city, to die as a human sacrifice to the half-man, half-beast monster that lately has been sighted in the kingdom. What happens thereafter that is not at all what either Ruen or her uncle had expected.

“The Stagman,” like “Healer,” is set in the world of Damar: Luthe once again makes a brief but critical appearance in the tale. The titular stagman is a mysterious shapeshifter that Ruen meets at a couple of key points in her life. Ruen’s name is indicative of her bittersweet life; she’s a solemn character who floats along letting other make decisions for her, and her passivity and emotional isolation makes her difficult to empathize with. Ruen remains passive until the very end, when she suddenly makes an understandable but controversial choice. 2 stars.

*****

“Touk’s House” is a variant on the Rapunzel fairy tale: a woodcutter’s youngest daughter falls ill, and the local doctor suggests that an herb from a nearby witch’s garden might heal her. In desperation, the woodcutter steals the herb, is caught by the witch, and given the herb (a different one than the one he was trying to steal) that will heal his daughter. But in return he is forced to give the witch his wife’s unborn child, their fifth daughter. At this point the tale veers off in a somewhat different direction: the witch Maugie raises baby Erana with love and teaches her the healing arts, and Maugie’s son Touk, half-troll with green skin and fangs, falls in love with Erana as she grows older. But Erana has to follow her own path first to decide what she wants in life.

This is another quiet tale, simply told, but with some unexpected insights into the various forms that love may take, and showing that winning a kingdom and the hand of a handsome prince might not be the optimal place to find personal happiness and peace. 3.5 stars.

*****

Perhaps appropriately because of my cover love for this book, my favorite story in this collection is “Buttercups.” Pos, an older widowed farmer, sees a chestnut-haired young woman at the market each week and falls in love. Awkwardly, he begins to court her, hardly believing that she can be interested in a man twenty years older than she. But Coral treats him with great affection, and agrees to be his wife when he eventually asks her. Transcendently blissful at first, Pos soon discovers two holes in the weave of his happiness: First, he overhears a servant’s spiteful gossip that Coral only married him to get away from her family’s poverty. The second is a troublesome hillock on his farm that stubbornly refuses to be cultivated and will grow only buttercups. When Pos and Coral discover that their horses’ shoes temporarily turn to gold when they ride their horses on Buttercup Hill, Pos begins to think that his second dilemma might be the answer to his first. He decides to try taking the horseshoes off the horse while they are gold, hoping that they’ll then remain gold, and thinking that Coral might be more content to stay if he is a richer man. But the wild magic of Buttercup Hill reacts in a way Pos never expected, and suddenly he has other major troubles to deal with.

In “Buttercups,” magic touches ordinary lives in a fascinating way. The interplay between the magical events and the characters’ lives, and the understanding Pos gains not only about Coral, but about his own heart and the need for honest communication, make this a wonderful moral tale as well as an unusual fantasy. 5 stars.

*****

The final story, “A Knot in the Grain,” is set in our modern world, with just a touch of magic. High school junior Annabelle has moved with her family to a new town, and Annabelle is feeling rather lost and adrift as the new kid in town, missing her old friends, and wanting to make new friends but feeling too shy and awkward to do so. In her attic bedroom one day, she touches a knot in a wooden beam in the low ceiling, which opens a crack to reveal a narrow set of stairs leading to a tiny hidden room. And in the hidden are shelves, and books, and a mysterious wooden box. The box seems to exude some kind of power, and it somehow seems very anxious to help Annabelle with any problems and concerns in her life.

“A Knot in the Grain” is the most overtly young adult story in this collection, with its teenage main character and her high school concerns, but I still found myself pulled into Annabelle’s world and interested in the outcome. It’s a fairly straightforward magical realism type of tale, but it takes an unexpected and thought-provoking turn in the end. 4 stars.

*****

These fantasies turn more on the internal lives of their characters than exciting adventures, but their quieter and thoughtful approach has its own appeal. McKinley’s recent works are sometimes frustrating in their lack of clarity and resolution, particularly with her penchant for including nightmarish and incomprehensible magical clashes. These stories from earlier in her career have a refreshing simplicity in comparison, evocative of classic folk and fairy tales.

Though I cannot recall much of these stories, saving the first and the last (the last being the title story and the only one set in modern times), I do remember not wanting to stop reading them until I had finished the entire volume. When I did finish the book, I wanted to go back and reread it, though I'd already read the first story several times. If you like well-constructed fantasy with interesting characters but where the dialogue is tight and spare and the descriptions take up more of the page, where there hovers more just out of reach, try these word perfect stories.

Pretty good writing and clean, too. These were earlier stories that have hints of Beauty, Sunshine, Chalice, and others, all whispering between the lines of these stories. My favorite was Buttercups, because of the theme of turning bad into good. Good YA, good fantasy, good short stories, good McKinley.

Pleasant

In the Blue Sword universe of Luthe there are others. And we get to read their stories, which satisfy without high emotions or controversy. Magical pleasantries.

A Knot in the Grain and Other Stories by Robin McKinley 4 outof 5 stars



I just finished reading this collection of short stories by Robin McKinley. Within are included five tales. The first tale: Healer tells the story of Lily, a child born with the magic to heal, but without the gift of speech. Lily, kind and loving, is apprenticed to Jolin to learn the ways of healers. Jolin and Lily become like family to one another, but Lily still feels the loneliness of never finding a love. Then one day a mage named Sahak who has lost his powers comes across Lily and they are able to communicate with each other through mind-speech. Their interactions will teach them about love, courage, and honor. I enjoyed this tale immensely; I’m a sucker for fairy tales and happy endings- and this one filled that perfectly. I give this tale 5 out of 5 stars.

The next tale: The Stagman tells the story of Ruen, an orphan princess mistreated by her uncle. I liked this tale, but the ending drove me to distraction. I couldn’t understand (spoilers coming!) why Ruen disappeared- was it because she was unhappy? Did she go back to stay with Luthe and the Stagman? Ambiguous endings like this drive me nuts! I have to give this tale 3 out of 5 stars.

The third tale: Touk’s House was a very nice twist on Rapunzel. I enjoyed this tale, although, I couldn’t help but feel that Erana ended up making the decision she made because of her bad experience with the prince. I give this tale 3.5 out 5 stars.

The fourth tale: Buttercups, I truly liked. Pos, an old widowed farmer, meets and falls in love with Coral. The two marry and live happily until Pos overhears one of his workers commenting that he thinks Coral just married him for his wealth. This starts a grain of doubt in Pos who begins to wonder if Coral truly loves him. His doubt causes him to do something that seemingly brings tragedy to their farm, but eventually ends in an ending that reaffirms the love they have for one another. I liked this tale a lot and I give it 5 out of 5 stars.

The fifth and last tale: A Knot in the Grain, is a modern tale. Annabelle and her family move to a small town. Her forays into the attic reveal a box which magically fulfills her wishes. This tale is a warm story of the possibilities of good coming from sad or difficult situations. I give this tale 4 out of 5 stars.


Overall, the collection is a wonderful read- I would recommend it to readers of all ages. I give the whole collection 4 out of 5 stars.