Most Popular Books by Robin Mckinley

The New York Times–bestselling author of Rose Daughter reimagines the classic French fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast. I was the youngest of three daughters. Our literal-minded mother named us Grace, Hope, and Honour. . . . My father still likes to tell the story of how I acquired my odd nickname: I had come to him for further information when I first discovered that our names meant something besides you-come-here. He succeeded in explaining grace and hope, but he had some difficulty trying to make the concept of honour understandable to a five-year-old. . . . I said: ‘Huh! I’d rather be Beauty.’ . . . By the time it was evident that I was going to let the family down by being plain, I’d been called Beauty for over six years. . . . I wasn’t really very fond of my given name, Honour, either . . . as if ‘honourable’ were the best that could be said of me. The sisters’ wealthy father loses all his money when his merchant fleet is drowned in a storm, and the family moves to a village far away. Then the old merchant hears what proves to be a false report that one of his ships had made it safe to harbor at last, and on his sad, disappointed way home again he becomes lost deep in the forest and has a terrifying encounter with a fierce Beast, who walks like a man and lives in a castle. The merchant’s life is forfeit, says the Beast, for trespass and the theft of a rose—but he will spare the old man’s life if he sends one of his daughters: “Your daughter would take no harm from me, nor from anything that lives in my lands.” When Beauty hears this story—for her father had picked the rose to bring to her—her sense of honor demands that she take up the Beast’s offer, for “cannot a Beast be tamed?” This “splendid story” by the Newbery Medal–winning author of The Hero and the Crown has been named an ALA Notable Book and a Phoenix Award Honor Book (Publishers Weekly).

An outcast princess must earn her birthright as a hero of the realm—in this “utterly engrossing” Newbery Medal–winning fantasy (The New York Times). Aerin is an outcast in her own father’s court, daughter of the foreign woman who, it was rumored, was a witch, and enchanted the king to marry her. She makes friends with her father’s lame, retired warhorse, Talat, and discovers an old, overlooked, and dangerously imprecise recipe for dragon-fire-proof ointment in a dusty corner of her father’s library. Two years, many canter circles to the left to strengthen Talat’s weak leg, and many burnt twigs (and a few fingers) secretly experimenting with the ointment recipe later, Aerin is present when someone comes from an outlying village to report a marauding dragon to the king. Aerin slips off alone to fetch her horse, her sword, and her fireproof ointment . . . But modern dragons, while formidable opponents fully capable of killing a human being, are small and accounted vermin. There is no honor in killing dragons. The great dragons are a tale out of ancient history. That is, until the day that the king is riding out at the head of an army. A weary man on an exhausted horse staggers into the courtyard where the king’s troop is assembled: “The Black Dragon has come . . . Maur, who has not been seen for generations, the last of the great dragons, great as a mountain. Maur has awakened.”

A small-town baker uses her magic to confront a post–vampire apocalypse world in this award-winning fantasy Neil Gaiman called “pretty much perfect.” Although it had been mostly deserted since the Voodoo Wars, there hadn’t been any trouble out at the lake for years. Rae Seddon, nicknamed Sunshine, head baker at her family’s busy and popular café in downtown New Arcadia, needed a place to get away from all the noise and confusion—of the clientele and her family. Just for a few hours. Just to be able to hear herself think. She knew about the Others, of course. Everyone did. And several of her family’s best regular customers were from SOF—Special Other Forces—which had been created to deal with the threat and the danger of the Others. She drove out to her family’s old lakeside cabin and sat on the porch, swinging her feet and enjoying the silence and the silver moonlight on the water. She never heard them coming. Of course, you don’t when they’re vampires. Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sookie Stackhouse will cheer for this tough and quirky heroine. In Sunshine, which won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, McKinley has a vampire novel that is “a smart, funny tale of suspense and romance” (San Francisco Chronicle).

From the Newbery Medal–winning author of The Hero and the Crown: the story of a princess who flees her father’s unwanted attention and finds an unexpected new life. Princess Lissla Lissar is the only child of the king and his queen, who was the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms. Everyone loved the splendid king and his matchless queen so much that no one had any attention to spare for the princess, who grew up in seclusion, listening to the tales her nursemaid told about her magnificent parents. But the queen takes ill of a mysterious wasting disease and on her deathbed extracts a strange promise from her husband: “I want you to promise me . . . you will only marry someone as beautiful as I was.” The king is crazy with grief at her loss, and slow to regain both his wits and his strength. But on Lissar’s seventeenth birthday, two years after the queen’s death, there is a grand ball, and everyone present looks at the princess in astonishment and whispers to their neighbors, How like her mother she is! On the day after the ball, the king announces that he is to marry again—and that his bride is the princess Lissla Lissar, his own daughter. Lissar, physically broken, half mad, and terrified, flees her father’s lust with her one loyal friend, her sighthound, Ash. It is the beginning of winter as they journey into the mountains—and on the night when it begins to snow, they find a tiny, deserted cabin with the makings of a fire ready-laid in the hearth. Thus begins Lissar’s long, profound, and demanding journey away from treachery and pain and horror, to trust and love and healing.

A Newbery Honor Book and a modern classic of young adult fantasy, The Blue Sword introduces the desert kingdom of Damar, where magic weaves through the blood and weaves together destinies. New York Times–bestselling and award-winning author Robin McKinley sets the standard for epic fantasy and compelling, complex heroines. Fans of Sarah J. Maas, Leigh Bardugo, and Rae Carson will delight in discovering the rich world of Damar. Harry Crewe is a Homelander orphan girl, come to live in Damar from over the seas. She is drawn to the bleak landscape, so unlike the green hills of her Homeland. She wishes she might cross the sands and climb the dark mountains where no Homelander has ever set foot, where the last of the old Damarians, the Free Hillfolk, live. Corlath is the golden-eyed king of the Free Hillfolk, son of the sons of the legendary Lady Aerin. When he arrives in Harry’s town to ally with the Homelanders against a common enemy, he never expects to set Harry’s destiny in motion: She will ride into battle as a King’s Rider, bearing the Blue Sword, the great mythical treasure, which no one has wielded since Lady Aerin herself. Legends and myths, no matter how epic, no matter how magical, all begin somewhere.

New York Times bestselling author Robin McKinley''s vivid retelling of the classic story of Robin Hood breathes contemporary life into these beloved adventures-with Marian taking a pivotal role as one of Robin''s best archers. Robin is an apprentice forester in the woods of Nottingham. The arrows he makes and sells earn barely enough extra coin to retain the title to his father’s small lands. The sheriff of Nottingham’s jealousy toward Robin’s father is just as fierce towards his son, and the sheriff’s men take every opportunity to harass the young woodsman. But when Robin defends himself by accidentally killing one of the sheriff’s men, he flees to Sherwood Forest, knowing that he has not only lost his father’s land and good name forever, but that he will live the rest of his days as a hunted man. But his friends Much, the miller’s son, and Lady Marian, Saxon daughter of the half-Norman lord who despises his Saxon blood, believe the disaster that has befallen Robin is also an opportunity: An opportunity for a few stubborn Saxons, cast out or outlawed in ways equally unjust, to gather together in secret under Robin’s leadership and strike back against the arrogance and brutality of the Norman overlords.

From ensorcelled princesses to a frog that speaks, an enchanting collection of fairy tales from the Newbery Medal–winning author. The last mortal kingdom before the unmeasured sweep of Faerieland begins has at best held an uneasy truce with its unpredictable neighbor. There is nothing to show a boundary, at least on the mortal side of it; and if any ordinary human creature ever saw a faerie—or at any rate recognized one—it was never mentioned; but the existence of the boundary and of faeries beyond it is never in doubt either. So begins “The Stolen Princess,” the first story of this collection, about the meeting between the human princess Linadel and the faerie prince Donathor. “The Princess and the Frog” concerns Rana and her unexpected alliance with a small, green, flipper-footed denizen of a pond in the palace gardens. “The Hunting of the Hind” tells of a princess who has bewitched her beloved brother, hoping to beg some magic of cure, for her brother is dying, and the last tale is a retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses in which an old soldier discovers, with a little help from a lavender-eyed witch, the surprising truth about where the princesses dance their shoes to tatters every night.

Award-winning author Robin McKinley tells an enthralling story of magic, love, and redemption, based on the classic tale of Beauty and the Beast. Once upon a time, a wealthy merchant had three daughters. When his business failed, he moved his daughters to the countryside. The youngest daughter, Beauty, is fascinated by the thorny stems of a mysterious plant that overwhelms their neglected cottage. She tends the plant until it blossoms with the most beautiful flowers the sisters have ever seen—roses. Admiring the roses, an old woman tells Beauty, “Roses are for love.” And she speaks of a sorcerers’ battle many years ago that left a beast in an enchanted palace, and a curse concerning a family of three sisters . . . The Newbery Medal–winning author’s charming retelling of the classic fairy tale weaves a tangled story of sorcery, loyalty, and love that is sure to cast a spell on readers.

Think of yourself out of your comfy chair and your nice house with the roads and the streetlights outside—and the ceiling overhead low enough that a fifty-foot dragon can’t stand on her hind legs and not bump her head—and think yourself into a cavern full of dragons. Go on. Try. Jake lives with his scientist father at the Makepeace Institute of Integrated Dragon Studies in Smokehill National Park. Smokehill is home to about two hundred of the few remaining Draco australiensis, which is extinct in the wild. There are five million acres of the Smokehill wilderness and the dragons rarely show themselves. Jack’s never seen one except deep in the park and at a distance. They stay away from the Institute—and the tourists. But dragon conservation is controversial. Detractors say dragons are much too dangerous and much too expensive, and should be destroyed. Supporters say there is no record of their doing anything more threatening than eating sheep, there are only a few hundred of them left at best and they must be protected. But they are up to eighty feet long (plus tail) and breathe fire. On Jake’s first overnight solo in the park, he meets a dragon—the thing that he would have said he wanted above everything else in the world. But this dragon is dying—dying next to the human she has killed. Jake knowns this news could destroy Smokehill. The dead man is clearly a poacher who attacked first, but that will be lost in the outcry against dragons. But then Jake notices something even more urgent: the dragon has just given birth, and one of the babies is still alive…

The earthlines speak to Mirasol, but her family has lived in the demesne for centuries, and many of the old families can hear the land. She knows that the violent deaths of the last Master and Chalice have thrown Willowlands into turmoil; but she is only a beekeeper, and the problems of the Circle that govern Willowlands have nothing to do with her—although she wonders what will become of her demesne, because the Master and Chalice left no heirs to carry on their crucial duties. And then the Circle come to Mirasol, to tell her that she has been chosen to be the new Chalice; and the Master she must learn to work with is a Priest of Fire, a man no longer quite human, whose touch can burn human flesh to the bone.

The evil fairy Pernicia has set a curse on Princess Briar-Rose: she is fated to prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and fall into an endless, poisoned sleep. Katriona, a young fairy, kidnaps the princess in order to save her; she and her aunt raise the child in their small village, where no one knows her true identity. But Pernicia is looking for her, intent on revenge for a defeat four hundred years old. Robin McKinley''s masterful version of Sleeping Beauty is, like all of her work, a remarkable literary feat.

Because she was a princess, she had a Pegasus… Princess Sylviianel has always known that on her twelfth birthday she too would be bound to her own Pegasus. All members of the royal family have been thus bound since the Alliance was made almost a thousand years ago; the binding system was created to strengthen the Alliance, because humans and pegasi can only communicate formally, through specially trained Speaker magicians. Sylvi is accustomed to seeing pegasi every day at the palace, but she still finds the idea of her binding very daunting. The official phrase is that your pegasus is your “Excellent Friend.” But how can you be friends with someone you can’t talk to? But everything is different for Sylvi and Ebon from the moment they meet at her binding—when they discover they can talk to each other. They form so close a bond that it becomes a threat to the status quo—and possibly to the future safety of their two nations. For some of the magicians believe there is a reason humans and pegasi should not fully understand each other…

Stories from the world of The Hero and the Crown and other magical places by a New York Times–bestselling Newbery Medal winner. Robin McKinley returns to the mythical setting of The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword in this “thrilling, satisfying, and thought-provoking collection” featuring two stories set in the world of Damar, plus three other fantasy tales featuring adventurous, pragmatic, and heroic young women (Publishers Weekly). There’s mute Lily, in “The Healer,” who has the power to help others, and receives a startling opportunity to find her voice when a mysterious mage stumbles into town. And Queen Ruen, who is at the mercy of a power-hungry uncle until she encounters a shape-changer in “The Stagman.” In “Touk’s House,” a maiden who has grown up with a witch and a troll has a chance to become a princess, but she must decide whether she would really live happily ever after. When a curse follows Coral to her new husband’s farm in “Buttercups,” the pair has a choice: Succumb to defeat or find a way to turn a disastrous enchantment into a fruitful new venture. Finally, travel to upstate New York with Annabelle. In the title story, her family moves shortly after her sixteenth birthday, and just as she starts to adjust to her new life in a small town, a plan to build a superhighway threatens her new home. But a strange box hidden in a secret attic in the new house may be the answer. This is a delightful assortment of tales from an author with “a remarkable talent for melding the real and the magical into a single, believable whole” (Booklist).

Maddy, a young woman who runs sheep on her family farm, develops an unusual relationship with an elusive mountain creature called a fey.

A compelling and inventive novel set in a world where science and magic are at odds, by Robin McKinley, the Newbery-winning author of The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword, as well as the classic fantasy titles Beauty, Chalice, Spindle’s End, Pegasus and Sunshine Maggie knows something’s off about Val, her mom’s new husband. Val is from Oldworld, where they still use magic, and he won’t have any tech in his office-shed behind the house. But—more importantly—what are the huge, horrible, jagged, jumpy shadows following him around? Magic is illegal in Newworld, which is all about science. The magic-carrying gene was disabled two generations ago, back when Maggie’s great-grandmother was a notable magician. But that was a long time ago. Then Maggie meets Casimir, the most beautiful boy she has ever seen. He’s from Oldworld too—and he’s heard of Maggie’s stepfather, and has a guess about Val’s shadows. Maggie doesn’t want to know . . . until earth-shattering events force her to depend on Val and his shadows. And perhaps on her own heritage. In this dangerously unstable world, neither science nor magic has the necessary answers, but a truce between them is impossible. And although the two are supposed to be incompatible, Maggie’s discovering the world will need both to survive. “A delightful read.” —Publishers Weekly “Bound to appeal.” —Kirkus Reviews

What magical beings inhabit earth''s waters? Some are as almost-familiar as the mer-people; some as strange as the thing glimpsed only as a golden eye in a pool at the edge of Damar''s Great Desert Kalarsham, where the mad god Geljdreth rules; or as majestic as the unknowable, immense Kraken, dark beyond the darkness of the deepest ocean, who will one day rise and rule the world. These six tales from the remarkable storytellers Robin McKinley and Peter Dickinson transform the simple element of water into something very powerful indeed.

Master storytellers Robin McKinley and Peter Dickinson, the team behind Water: Tales of Elemental Spirits, collaborate again to create five captivating tales incorporating the element of fire. In McKinley?s ?First Flight,? a boy and his pet foogit unexpectedly take a dangerous ride on a dragon, and her ?Hellhound? stars a mysterious dog as a key player in an eerie graveyard showdown. Dickinson introduces a young man who must defeat the creature threatening his clan in ?Fireworm,? a slave who saves his village with a fiery magic spell in ?Salamander Man,? and a girl whose new friend, the guardian of a mystical bird, is much older than he appears in ?Phoenix.? With time periods ranging from prehistoric to present day, and settings as varied as a graveyard, a medieval marketplace and a dragon academy, these stories are sure to intrigue and delight the authors? longtime fans and newcomers alike.

"The Contest" is an illustrated children''s book teaching children what the Fruit of the Spirit is in a story about a farmer who wants to have the biggest, the juiciest, the plumpest, and the sweetest grapes in the whole county. Each grape has its own captivating personality which depicts a different fruit of the Spirit that your children will fall in love with. The unpredictable twist at the end teaches the most valuable lesson of all. It will allow children of all ages grow to be what God wants them to be. "The Contest" has been a favorite for countless children throughout the years.

Twas the Night of Christmas is a poetic version for children telling the story of the night Jesus was born. Robin McKinley told this story through the voice of a puppet to audiences in churches at Christmas time each year when he and his wife Cindy conducted Kid''s Crusades. This colorfully illustrated book will be enjoyed by people of all ages. The end of the book emphasizes the gift God gave to all mankind.

A Book of Devotions from the Journal of Pastor Robin McKinley. Each entry consists of a scripture text, the devotion, a challenge and a prayer. There is also a space to jot down what the Holy Spirit may have revealed to you through his Word.

SOLO UNA RAGAZZA PUÒ USARE UNA SPADA DAL POTERE MAGICO... La madre e il padre di Harry Crewe sono morti, così suo fratello Richard trova per lei una sistemazione presso due nobili signori, che se ne prendono cura come di una figlia. La regione desertica nella quale si stabilisce, odiata dai suoi abitanti per le difficili condizioni climatiche, esercita invece sulla ragazza un fascino inspiegabile. Ma è una terra su cui incombe la minaccia di una guerra: le popolazioni del Nord vogliono spazzar via il Popolo delle Colline. Nel timore di non poter affrontare il nemico, Corlath, sovrano delle Colline, portatore di un Dono magico tramandato dai suoi antenati, chiede aiuto alla gente di Harry; l’incontro fortuito con la ragazza risveglia in quel re dallo sguardo misterioso un desiderio così forte da indurlo a portarla via con sé. Harry scopre così una cultura che segue i ritmi naturali, e si lega al re come nessun’altra donna era riuscita a fare prima; viene addestrata come un guerriero e ben presto la sua abilità arriva a domare la leggendaria Spada Blu. E mentre la guerra si profila all’orizzonte, Harry si troverà a mettere alla prova la sua arte, in una missione proibita e pericolosa che la porterà molto lontano.

Chinese edition of the popular The Hero and the Crown, the 1984 Newbery Medal winner by Robin McKinley. In Traditional Chinese. Annotation copyright Tsai Fong Books, Inc. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc.

A young girl doesn''t remember her father, a ship''s captain who has been at sea.

This is volume 4 a Book of Devotions from the Journal of Pastor Robin McKinley. Each entry consists of a scripture text, the devotion, a challenge and a prayer. There is also a space to jot down what the Holy Spirit may have revealed to you through his Word

A child and her new puppy work through the difficult initial adjustments and soon belong to each other.