I finished reading Arrows of the Queen, by Mercedes Lackey. I originally discovered this book at the Baldwinsville Public Library when I was in 7th grade. I was on a mission to read every fantasy novel in the Young Adult section, and I fell in love with Valdemar immediately and read all that had been published to date at the time. Coming back to it 30 years later, I can easily see the allure. Lackey crafts a tale focused on the characters, with major kingdom-level events being glossed over in favor of a tight focus on the individuals involved.
The treatment of sex in this novel as neither shameful nor particularly aspirational is refreshing to me 30 years later because it’s been 30 years of media produced by horny, fetish-afflicted, self-loathing men that has largely made me wince at the thought of sex intruding into a story I’m otherwise enjoying. And while I already know that Lackey makes the decision to use sexual assault as a plot device in a later novel, here at least there is no hint of it.
When I read this novel, I had no idea that so many girls and subsequently women have a powerful love for horses. I had no opinion on horses in general, and the telepathic magical horses didn’t strike me as odd. Having watched Bob’s Burgers, I was forced to imagine Mercedes Lackey as a sortof Tina figure, but I thought the Companions as written were totally fine.
One plot point I couldn’t overlook – the Companions are magically generated for the good of the Kingdom by an unknown force in the middle of a field. I feel like in any other novel, they would have been presented as the work of a god worshiped by the kingdom or the spirit of the forest, and it’s honestly pretty weird that they seem to accept that they are being spawned from nothing solely to serve them with no religion forming around the obvious miracles.
Queen Selaney seems hell bent on destroying Valdemar, inviting an outsider to be her husband who, obviously, wants her kingdom? Granting his lackeys titles, and then when it’s discovered they planned to kill her, she just leaves them installed as nobility? When it’s clear her daughter has been subverted in some way, she waits around for Roland to find someone to raise her child instead of taking up the task herself? She was easily the worst character in the novel, but I do understand that if she was a competent ruler, there would have been no story to tell and none of this would have been left to a random abused 13 year old Mormon Holderkin.
Despite the issues, I found it an easy and pleasant read and I may read the rest of the trilogy later.
