Warriors

I found this picture on Pinterest:

Credit: Link from Io9.com

And it makes me strong. When I am having a difficult day, I imagine that I look like this: Armor-clad, beautiful, scarred, but still strong, still fighting.

I read old stories with new vision now that I am older, seeing in them the struggle of putting one foot in front of the other. Frodo, for example. As a child, I was always disappointed that he couldn't get over his wounds from the war and the role he played in it. The others were all able to move on with their lives. But not Frodo. He still felt old twinges of pain in his chest from his Weathertop wound. He still struggled around the anniversary of that same wound. He was changed forever.

But that didn't happen all in a rush. It happened as he put one foot in front of the other on his way to Mordor. It happened when the Fellowship broke into pieces and his friends were snatched from him. It happened as his body began to fail him, yet onward he trudged until Sam had to carry him because he was too weak to go on.

So it is with warriors.

They don't become warriors in an instant; it happens over time, small event after small choice after tiny cut. But warriors are warriors because they keep going. They get up when others would simply die; they move their foot forward when their mind is screaming that they couldn't possibly take another step; they keep fighting in spite of the uneven odds.

This picture reminds me of the beauty in what warriors of all kinds lose - but also in what they gain.

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Who is your favorite warrior (real or imaginary)?

The Blue Sword

I discovered Robin McKinley when my dad read us her book The Outlaws of Sherwood, a pragmatic and slightly depressing retelling of the Robin Hood legend. I remember attempting to read a few of her other books and not falling in love with them really, until I read The Blue Sword. 

The Blue Sword is about a girl named Harry. That’s right - a girl. You love it already don’t you? I couldn’t tell you why her name is Harry, even though I’ve read the book several times. I think it is a nick name. Harry is forced to move to a new town when her father dies, a town that is essentially a military outpost and is on the edge of a vast desert, home to a strange and foreign people. Harry is inadvertently swept up in a war between these foreigners and their long-time enemies. 

Spoiler alert: She gets a blue sword.

If you’ve been reading my blog posts about the books I loved as a child, you will no doubt notice a theme when I say that I loved Harry because she wasn’t proper and well-behaved. She preferred horseback riding to sitting daintily in a parlor and not to give anything away, she kicks some pretty serious keister by the end of the book.

This book fits squarely in the fantasy genre and is technically young adult, but McKinley is a talented author, so it is young adult I think mainly because it doesn’t have cursing, sex, and violence or other mature content.

If you don’t love fantasy, you might not enjoy this book. It’s fairly traditional in it’s fantastical elements and plot. If you do love fantasy, you will enjoy McKinley’s world building and the development of Harry’s character.

7 Reasons Why You Need to Read the Harry Potter Series (*cough* for my sisters)

1. The magic. It doesn’t matter how old you are, there is something charming and delightful about the idea of magic. Rowling does it complete justice – it is never overly simplistic, it is never too easy, and it is always incredibly brilliant. I know some of you are refusing to read it because magic isn’t real; that is utter nonsense. Clearly you have forgotten that decades ago, most of our current technology would have been considered “magical,” and there is still a lot in the world that can’t be explained. So if you believe in any unproven scientific hypothesis, then by extension, you have to believe in magic. You don’t really have an option.

2. It is a national bestseller ten times over. If you haven’t read it yet, you are probably part of the 1% that hasn’t. Don’t be part of the 1%. Yes, I am shamelessly using peer pressure as an argument. Mainly because if you read 50 Shades of Gray – “just to see what all the hype was about” – then you can read Harry Potter.

3. Life is awful. Really awful sometimes. I can’t understand people who only like reading books about reality: death, war, despair, lust, and greed – and no happy endings. Take a break every once in awhile. The awfulness will still be there, waiting, once you’ve finished the book. Besides, doesn’t your brain EVER get tired of thinking? Go on a mental vacation into the world of wizards and witches. It is so much cheaper than any staycation – just think how jealous your friends will be when you say you spent a weekend at Hogwarts and they only went to the zoo and the movie theater. I know you are an adult. I know that hippogriffs don’t exist; there is no need to be snobby about it. Hippogriffs can make your life better rather they are real or not.

4. Rowling is funny. Chuckling-to-yourself-out-loud-in-the-coffee-shop kind of funny.

5. Surprising applicability. That’s right, you heard me. The topics, events, and ideas in Harry Potter are actually surprisingly applicable to our world (otherwise known as the wasteland of cold, hard reality). If anyone has told you that these books are all about important ideas such as love and friendship, they are correct, but those topics are not quite as startlingly applicable. Rowling’s discussion of death and grief is incredibly intense, accurate, insightful, and comforting. The parts of the story that I find most powerful are those that deal with the awfulness of the world – death, corruption, evil, selfishness. (Now hold on, you mutter, I thought reading these books would help me escape from these awful truths. Well, I was getting to that…) But through all of these difficult topics, Rowling always manages to give us hope. Hope that great sacrifices can make a difference, hope that death is not the end.

6. Rowling does an excellent job with character development, and not just with the major characters. Anything else I say here will sound cliché (“it’s like the characters are real – like they are your friends – like they are 3D – like everyone else already used up all the words in the world to talk about well-developed characters and they didn’t save any for me”). So I will leave it at that.

7. World building. The details about the wizarding world are perfect – the smaller the detail, the more delightful it is. From butterbeer to quidditch, from the pamphlets released to the public about protecting your home from Death Eaters to the completely amusing jumble of departments that make up the Ministry of Magic, these glimpses into this alternate universe are one of my favorite parts of reading these books.