Robin McKinley has a new book coming out in September of this year, Dragonhaven. It centers around a young man rather than a young woman, which is unusual for Robin McKinley, but I find I'm actually looking forward to sharing it with Elessar and my dad. Her female-centered stories, while enormously compelling for me, are rather less attractive to them. Although if they gave them a chance...hmm.

At any rate, after reading about Dragonhaven I wandered around the rest of McKinley's site. I usually try to avoid writers' websites---as I always seem to stumble on something I'd rather not know about them---but sometimes I find the temptation impossible to resist. In this instance, I didn't find anything distasteful, but I do feel a little...raw...now. She loves fairy tales, as I do. She's been influenced by Tolkien and Kipling, to whom my dad has compared my writing. And she's received lots and lots of angry and disgusted reader mail about Deerskin, my favorite of her novels.

Reading some of the twisted and furious thoughts those readers relayed to her made me angry. And finding that McKinley's and my own perspectives on the meaning of the book are so similar made me sad. Does she get letters from readers like me, I wonder, who have read that book and gained strength and courage and inspiration from it? Is she told that this reader's views on writing and truth, life and herself would never have been the same were it not for that book? And I've never, ever experienced the pain Deerskin does in the novel. I simply found something in her that was me, and grew and changed as she did.

I've never really wanted to write an author and express my opinion on their work. I don't know exactly why this is---perhaps just a sense that they wouldn't really care, lofty and famous as they are---but now I feel almost as though I have to write and explain how very, very grateful I am that Deerskin exists.

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