The Blue Sword

The Blue Sword (1982) is a fantasy novel by Robin McKinley, with a young female swordswoman as protagonist.

Awards for The Blue Sword:

• Newbery Honor Book, 1983
• ALA Best Book for Young Adults, 1982
• ALA Notable Children's Book, 1982

See also

• The Hero and the Crown, a prequel to this story

Intertextuality

Robin McKinley states :

Sword's immediate inspiration is Kipling's story The Man Who Would Be King, as funnelled through John Huston's reading of it as a film, and crossbred with The Sheik. Speaking of embarrassing and detestable stories. I read E M Hull's The Sheik because I thought it was going to be not only a wonderful old-fashioned British Empire adventure novel, like The Four Feathers or Beau Geste, but a wonderful old-fashioned British Empire novel where an English woman rides off into the desert to have adventures. It isn't. It's about the punishment a woman who tries to do a man's job — i.e. ride off into the desert and have adventures — necessarily calls down upon herself and how if she's punished long and hard enough she'll learn to like it and embrace it as her fate as a woman. Oh yes, and the sheik himself turns out to be English — not a, you know, unsavoury foreigner — so it's okay that she falls in love with him after he's been raping her into submission for a while.

External Links

• Wikipedia entry
• Review by Jo Walton

References

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