Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

... and I still do, but I've been reading reviews by readers who absolutely hated it, and I'd like to address them. But first of all, this IS a story with an orphaned princess, a nice prince, some wizards, a couple of magical artifacts, dragons... - except it reads nothing like such books. The princess is tall, clumsy, red-haired with too big feet and she proves a disappointment (in her mind at least) to her family and her country. She decides to fight dragons, which is not a glamorous task, since dragons in her land are small and considered as oversized vicious rodents - nothing heroic. She poisons herself, burns herself, does her best, goes into the wilderness alone, expects to die, climbs unending stairs, doesn't know what the hell she's doing... And yes, indeed, very little is explained. As a young reader I found this frustrating - but just about as much as I did the 'real world'. Who is Aerin? Where did her mother come from? What are her powers? What happened before her birth? What does any of it mean?? Aerin herself asks those questions over and over, mostly gets no answers, is also frustrated (it's her life after all!) but she trundles on nonetheless and makes something of herself, something actually quite heroic after all, even though we get the nitty gritty and not the shining banners. So okay, even though I wished for more background information, more rules, more knowledge of the odds, or even the mythology, I took it in stride - as I did life. For writers who provide all that, see the great John Ronald Rueul Tolkien! There is something I very much liked in the book and that quite a few American commentators took exception to; Aerin is in love with 2 men, who are extremely different, and who hold widely different places in her heart, and times in her now almost immortal life Yes, she does have sex 'before marriage', whatever that means in such a different context. I found that prudery amusing. Aerin is a free agent, and her body and life are hers to do as she wishes. I remember liking this even as an 11-year old, I was glad the author trusted us with such complexity and not the usual saccharine fairy tale ending. I enjoyed Aerin's freedom, her capacity to live and love, and the knowledge that someone out there knew that life was never as simple as 'They lived happily ever after'. I certainly hadn't known anyone who did! Only much later did I realize how strongly feminist this book was, and how much of a role model Aerin had become to me...