Pegasus by Robin McKinley

Pegasus
by Robin McKinley
November 2010
Putnam Juvenile

Because she was a princess, she had a pegasus.

As a young adult, Robin McKinley introduced me to the world of fantasy.  I have read every book she has ever written - even the truly awful ones.  McKinley both amazes and frustrates me.  As the years go by, her books are getting harder and harder to get into.  So much so that you can read 300 of 400 pages before anything beyond environmental descriptions take place.  But you keep reading.  And you do it because her descriptions of different lands, people and species haunt you.  She pulls you into worlds so unlike your own, and yet so heartbreakingly similar that you can't stop, can't let go, can't simply chuck the stupid book against the wall and read something you actually want to be reading.

In Pegasus, McKinley has crafted just such a world.  Here, however, is a kingdom where Pegasi and humans have a treaty that allies and binds them to one another.  Being such different species, however, they are unable to speak except through translators.  Until the day that Sylvi meets Ebon.  The floating, dream-like feel of this book was reminiscent of Ursula K. LeGuin and Madeline L'Engle's classic fantasies.  The ending, however, was all Tokien as McKinley herself admits on her blog that she has crafted a cliffhanger that mimics Tolkien's end to The Two Towers:

"It’s going to be a sequel like The Return of the Kings is a sequel to The Two Towers.  Remember the last line of Two Towers? ‘Frodo was alive but taken by the Enemy’? Yes… You’re going to hate me for the ending of Pegasus."

Pegasus II is set to come out in 2012.  I suggest you wait until then to read Pegasus.  Then again, it might just take you that long to finish book one . . .