I finished Dragonhaven this morning. I started it last night instead of being a good girl and writing… and in the usual McKinley fashion I was sucked in. It says a lot when I read a book in the morning rather than doing something like, well, sleeping. (I started it last night, went to bed, then woke up and read it from 8am-10am; I’m not crazy anymore.) I really enjoyed it. The narrative voice was very different from anything she’s ever written before — in a book. If anything it was most like Rae’s voice in Sunshine, but that’s a lot to do with the fact that they’re both written in the first person. Jake sounds a lot more like how Robin sounds in her blog entries — a little rambly, a lot of parentheticals, etc. — but he’s also himself. (Considering how similar to me that is on occasion, I had no problems syntactically.) She even created a bunch of words — JOY — and used phrases that are a little crazy but really true to what certain people, like Jake’s character, would say. For instance, in reference to something that happens that’s almost the end of the world:

It’s so almost an almost that of all the almost moments I’ve told you about, that’s probably the almostest of all.

I personally loved that line. I could have seen myself saying that to someone. (Bryan will tell me that when I tell a story to him I am so full of hyperbole and slang and exaggeration that if he hadn’t actually read my stuff he’d think I was more than half mad.) Getting back to the topic, some people will inevitably find that a difficult to read book. It’s not a kids’ book — there are typical teenage/adult swear words, the content at times alludes to a lot of thick stuff I think you need to be at least 14 or 15 to really get (though precocious annoying me would have devoured it at 12), but it’s definitely a fun read and a satisfying one. You have to really come to the novel with the knowledge of the devices she’s using, though, to appreciate it. It’s not a plain-and-simple adventure story of a boy and his dragon. Go read Eragon (if you can stand to — wait, wait. Did I just recommend someone read that book?! GO READ THE HOBBIT or ask your librarian to recommend something with a pre-1990 publication date.) or something else if you’re looking for one of those.

What’s brilliant about this book is the way Jake tells it is so terrific and appropriate for the matter and tenor of the story. It’s sort of a story-within-a-story in that regard — lots of direct audience address, lots of asides and messy insertions and commentary on the commentary — but it comes out feeling genuine for all of that, which is a difficult trick to pull off. It’s also structured in a way that’s highly dependent on the narrative voice, which really did have to be distinctive. She couldn’t have written that same story in a different voice and gotten the effect she’s developed there. I was imagining that story in the third person and my brain immediately started hacking and slashing things and I realized that that too would have made it entirely, fundamentally different.)

Oddly, too — this is a bit of a spoiler, so don’t click the link below if you don’t want to — I read one of Robin’s (when did I switch from referring to her as “McKinley” in classic academic style to all of a sudden being all intimate? Okay. Weird. I don’t know her personally; I’m going back to being an academic) — McKinley’s blog entries (cough) before I actually read the novel. Somehow, based on the hoopla that one mother had caused I was thinking that that moment in the novel would be huge. It wasn’t. It was very nice, actually. Yay for those moments!

For the sake of not having to blank-out more spoilers for those of you who don’t want spoiled endings, I won’t reveal anything else that isn’t sort of obvious from what the front jacket says. I enjoyed it; some of the comments on Facebook’s Visual Bookself page (here) were all over the spectrum — some loved it, some couldn’t finish it, some read it but couldn’t get into the voice — which was very interesting. Personally, I like books that are a little different from the norm; actually what I liked the best was that this was not the “kid and his/her dragon” book that people might have been expecting. People who’ve read McKinley’s entire canon — can we call it a canon, or do you have to be an Oxford-educated wizened old man to have a “canon”? — should know that she takes ideas and turns them on their heads quite frequently. One of the best parts of her as a writer, actually, is the fact that she’s not like everyone else. If only someone had told Christopher Paolini that… (Okay, enough maligning of Paolini; the poor kid just needs an education and a new library — Okay! That was the end! I swear!)

Anyway this was precisely the book I needed to drag me away from the… funk? that Meyer’s book put me in. Now I don’t feel like I need to write about stuff I don’t want to write about just people people keep doing it. *Happy sigh* All the people at CMU liked when I took ideas they were familiar with and did something unexpected with them — and they liked the idea of self-contained stories. So I’m going to go back to actually doing that than reading looooong series books that make me feel bad about the fact that I don’t like to write series books.

On to productive things.