Robin McKinley

... and it is kind of what you get when you are a girl who grows up in kind of the lady knight girl power era of YA fiction.

I would say Tamora Pierce is in there, Robin McKinley, Garth Nix a little bit.

Um, so you love a girl with a sword, and then you grow up and you go to grad school, and you have to encounter the sort of harsher realities [laughs] of what knighthood is and what medievalism is, and why we keep these things alive as, um, Western cultures, and who it serves to tell stories about good kings, and justified wars, and loyal knights, and all of these, these things that are essentially bummers.

So it's sort of this childlike wonder combined with the bummer of coming of age that we all have to go through, and you get a book that is trying to be both at once.

Uh, content warning, s- s- slightly sexy stuff, I think, happens in those books.

Um, Hero and the Crown and the Blue Sword by Robin McKinley.

Uh, what if you're the daughter of the king, you're not the heir to the throne, you don't fit in anywhere, there are dragons, uh, ravaging the countryside.

Uh, you try to invent, uh, an ointment that, that makes you impervious to fire and become a dragon slayer.

That's what this book is about.

And then this is, like, sort of a spinoff of that book.

But any Robin McKinley book, she's got a really cool Robin Hood book.

She's got a really cool Beauty and the Beast book.