[openbook booknumber=”0449905888″]

[rating:4/5]

In popular mythology there are stories and legends aplenty about great heroes who go on quests and, after facing overwhelming odds, return home victorious. These heroes continue their stories throughout the ages, of men who face dragons, fight for what they believe in, and change the times they live in whether for the better or the worse. In The Sound of a Silver Horn a question is posed, why are there no such heroes for women? Why isn’t there a “female hero” to journey alone, to face great odds, to change things? Why, when asked to name such a woman, can we only name a few, and only a very small number of them real?

Women can be heroes as well, but their type of heroism is different from a man’s. Men’s quests are of the lone wolf variety, working in a vacuum, taking all the risk, and getting all the credit, accepting occasional outside help, but never working in tandem with anyone else, or willing to share the limelight for long. Women work in a collective, risk is taken but account for that risk is tempered with thoughts of the impact on others than herself, credit is shared, help accepted, and working in tandem with others is considered a strength, not a weakness. This book goes into those details of just what makes a female hero. She is not less then a male hero, merely differently empowered and goes about her quest in a different, but no less powerful or profound way.

[openbook booknumber=”0385729332″]

[rating:4/5]

There has been a lot in the news about this book. It has even been made into a movie. So naturally i was assuming lots of grown up drama and not a little bit of sex to titilate and the like. You can’t have a book about women make it so big without something for the less highly evolved brain to latch onto. Imagine my surprise when I saw that it was not only a book about teenagers, I had assumed more like my age in young women, but that it was a book written for teenagers.

Normally books written about and for teenagers, I have found, seem to stick to the high school scene – God forbid there be any place else to live life, the character’s powerlessness – as teenagers and as young women, and the books never lend much credence to the fact that there is life beyond high school- or they only do so in the abstract sense of: “Oh yeah, college.”

This book takes place over a summer – no school. You get a very real sense of the power these young women have, to get up and go, to face their fears and so on. And, since this book distances itself so much from the “school” scene, the fact that there is a future not only of college but beyond college is evident. Life is evident as not only a now but as a fluid thing and that is part of what makes this book incredibly awesome, to me.