The first time I read The Hero and the Crown, I think I was about fourteen. A life-long reader, I was already a little jaded about what I thought I knew about fantasy. But as soon as I started reading Hero, I fell right into step with Aerin. The setting, the characters, the dialogue-I felt like I knew Aerin. Because even though I didn't live in a fictional fantasy kingdom, I didn't like horses, and I knew next to nothing about swordplay, I was her. 
 The Hero and the Crown was published in 1984 as the prequel to Robin McKinley's earlier novel The Blue Sword, which focuses on the exploits of another unlikely heroine. It won the Newbery Medal in 1985, and is cited in several scholarly works as being groundbreaking in reimagining gender roles in fantasy. But all of that is just a fancy way of saying that when McKinley picked up her pen, she was writing something new, and it was something that was so obviously true and necessary that it resounded with her readers, making The Hero and the Crown into the fantasy classic it is today. 
 The Hero and the Crown tells the story of Aerin, the only child of a widowed king ruling over the kingdom of Damar. Aerin is shy and awkward, and plagued by the knowledge that she is different, somehow tainted by her strange, foreign mother who died in childbirth. This knowledge is reinforced by cruel cousins who constantly torture her, and Aerin stays mostly to herself, her only friends being Tor, the crown prince, and Talat, her father's old war horse. 
 When a magical injury causes Aerin to fall ill for a time, she whiles away the time reading old books from the castle's library in the horse pasture with Talat. One of the old books holds a puzzling recipe, claiming to make the wearer impervious to dragon fire. Aerin, imagining becoming a Dragon-Killer as a good way to stop the taunts of her cousins and prove once and for all that she is good enough to be royalty, sets out to make the mixture, and, after much trial and error, begins to kill dragons. However, when an ancient evil stirs in the North Aerin must go up against terrors she never dreamed she would face, and faces the decision of a lifetime. 
 The beautiful thing about Aerin is that she is a flawed character, and she knows it. She is tortured by the knowledge that she's not worth much to those around her, and constantly compares herself to others. These comparisons cloud her judgment, making it hard for her to see the few people around her who do really care about her. Aerin's feelings of social ostracism and awkwardness are the same kinds of thing that every girl goes through at some point in her life, making Aerin's fight and struggle for her destiny seem all the more real to us. 
 The Hero and the Crown, at the end of the day, is not really about fighting dragons and climbing towers for a showdown with evil, any more than it's a love story. What the story is really about is accepting who you are, regardless of the flaws that you may perceive in yourself and moving forward with purpose-even if you don't know what that purpose is. It gives hope of all of the fourteen year old girls out there, mentally or physically, by reminding us of that age old phrase: "This too shall pass," while tacking on to the end of it, "But it probably won't get easier, though."