A Knot in the Grain by Robin McKinley Reveals Author to Have an Older-Man Obsession

I’ve taken my time reading through this collection of McKinley’s short fantasy stories. It's called A Knot in the Grain and Other Stories (1994).  I’ve never considered myself a huge Robin McKinley fan, but I did read a couple of her most lauded novels when I was young. I recall feeling about the same about them as I did these short stories—that they were interesting but not gripping.  I’m sure I read at least one of them twice, but I can’t recall a thing about either except the book covers. I certainly don’t recall the female protagonists falling in love with decades-older men!  They may have, of course, and I just accepted it as a one-off surprise, but in this bunch of short stories, the theme was striking in its repetition. I believe all but the last involved a girl falling for a much, much older man. In the last story, the girl has a boyfriend her age but is not at all in love with him.  Anyhow, this repeat older-man theme was just too much, in my opinion. 

The tales are meandering but well-written, of course.  She is, after all, a Newberry-Medal-winning author!  Any of the stories alone would have been fine and pleasant. While I might have been startled by the age difference, it would likely have been part of the charm that she’d written something a bit more unique and unexpected.  By the end of the collection, however, I was a bit horrified to think what influence an entire book of YA short stories with that repeat older-man-romance theme might have on impressionable girls who up until then would have never even considered looking at an older man that way.  Aside from that, however, I liked hearing the stories—wistful, vague, dreamlike, often featuring gardens and flowers. 

Just before writing this review, I looked up the author on Wikipedia and found that indeed, she had married a decades-older man. Not only that, but he gardened, and she took that up as well.  So I must shrug, concluding that this Scorpio woman was simply deeply in love with her now-deceased husband, so deeply in love that it was the only place her imagination took her. Quite an odd place for the vast majority of us—especially, I imagine, for any teenage girls who might be reading her stories. Or maybe it’s even worse for the mothers of teenage girls (like me) to read, honestly! I remained a bit uncomfortable throughout, but the stories were still sweet in a way.  Strange but sweet.