Robin McKinley: Chalice
I don't read much fantasy. I find a lot of it poorly thought out and derivative to the point of absurdity. You know, smiths who make swords, but nobody is mining anything, that sort of thing. Huge armies with no way to support them. Impractical romanticizing and fetishizing of a particular pre-industrial moment in human history, but without all of the negatives that would imply. Point being, this is one of the rare fantasy books I've read over and over. Mirasol gets the role of Chalice because some rods (???) divined that she's the one. And she definitely is. Her bees suddenly make enormous quantities of honey, her goats are producing prodigious quantities of milk, and some mead in the cellar overflows and fills the whole space and smells up her house so much that she has to sleep outside. This is why I love Robin McKinley for fantasy. She's practical and grounded and knows how things actually work. So maybe that's what I dislike about most fantasy. It's full ...