Robin McKinley Ebook Titles on Sale

It's a new month which means there is a new list for October Monthly Deals: Kindle Books for $3.99 or Less. I found a few books for me, but the squeeing came with two finds I didn't have in ebook yet--although the hardcovers have graced my shelves for years.

Robin McKinley has explored her favorite fairy tale (and mine)--Beauty and the Beast--in three different novels. The first, Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast, isn't on sale, but the other two are available this month for $1.99 in ebook format instead of the usual $5.99 to $8.99 price range. There are a few bonuses, too, listed below.

So you can get all four books listed below for about the price one is usually priced. Happiness abounds!

Book description for Sunshine:

Winner of the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature: In a world where darkness threatens, there is Sunshine . . .

Although it had been mostly deserted since the Voodoo Wars, there hadn’t been any trouble out at the lake for years. Rae Seddon, nicknamed Sunshine, head baker at her family’s busy and popular café in downtown New Arcadia, needed a place to get away from all the noise and confusion—of the clientele and her family. Just for a few hours. Just to be able to hear herself think.

She knew about the Others, of course. Everyone did. And several of her family’s best regular customers were from SOF—Special Other Forces—which had been created to deal with the threat and the danger of the Others.

She drove out to her family’s old lakeside cabin and sat on the porch, swinging her feet and enjoying the silence and the silver moonlight on the water.

She never heard them coming. Of course, you don’t when they’re vampires.

Book description for Rose Daughter:

Award-winning author Robin McKinley returns to one of our most enduring fairy tales to tell an enthralling story of love and redemption

Once upon a time, a wealthy merchant had three daughters . . . and when the merchant’s business failed, he and his three daughters left their grand house in the city and moved to a tiny cottage buried deep in the countryside. The youngest daughter, Beauty, is fascinated by the long, thorny stems of an unknown plant that overwhelms the neglected cottage, and she tends it until, the following summer, its rich, fragrant flowers are the most glorious things the sisters have ever seen: roses.

An old woman tells Beauty: “Roses are for love. Not . . . silly sweethearts’ love but the love that makes you and keeps you whole. . . . There’s an old folk-tale . . . there aren’t many roses around any more because they need more love than people have to give ’em . . . and the only thing that’ll stand in for love is magic, though it ain’t as good.”

There’s no magic in the town of Longchance, but, the old woman adds, Beauty may not know that this is the result of a sorcerers’ battle that happened many years ago, a battle that left a monster, or perhaps a beast, in an enchanted palace somewhere in the deep forest . . . and a curse concerning a family of three sisters.

Bonus! The Hero and the Crown is also $1.99! I didn't have this in ebook yet either. I adored this book as a teen--I remember reading it for the first time when sick one day, pausing to run to the bathroom and then rushing back to resume reading, back and forth all day. This book was better than any other medicine to get me through a horrible day thirty years ago.

The sale price has also made this an instant #1 best seller on Amazon for Children's Girls & Women Books. Cool!

Book description for The Hero and the Crown:

In Robin McKinley’s Newbery Medal–winning novel, an outcast princess must earn her birthright as a hero of the realm

Aerin is an outcast in her own father’s court, daughter of the foreign woman who, it was rumored, was a witch, and enchanted the king to marry her.

She makes friends with her father’s lame, retired warhorse, Talat, and discovers an old, overlooked, and dangerously imprecise recipe for dragon-fire-proof ointment in a dusty corner of her father’s library. Two years, many canter circles to the left to strengthen Talat’s weak leg, and many burnt twigs (and a few fingers) secretly experimenting with the ointment recipe later, Aerin is present when someone comes from an outlying village to report a marauding dragon to the king. Aerin slips off alone to fetch her horse, her sword, and her fireproof ointment . . .

But modern dragons, while formidable opponents fully capable of killing a human being, are small and accounted vermin. There is no honor in killing dragons. The great dragons are a tale out of ancient history.

That is, until the day that the king is riding out at the head of an army. A weary man on an exhausted horse staggers into the courtyard where the king’s troop is assembled: “The Black Dragon has come . . . Maur, who has not been seen for generations, the last of the great dragons, great as a mountain. Maur has awakened.”

The Outlaws of Sherwood is also on sale again for $1.99. A Robin Hood retelling, this was on sale last year around this time, too, so I did have this one already in ebook (as well as hardcover, of course, a first edition).

Book description for The Outlaws of Sherwood:

The Robin Hood legend comes thrillingly alive in Robin McKinley’s reimagining of the classic adventure

Young Robin Longbow, subapprentice forester in the King’s Forest of Nottingham, must contend with the dislike of the Chief Forester, who bullies Robin in memory of his popular father. But Robin does not want to leave Nottingham or lose the title to his father’s small tenancy, because he is in love with a young lady named Marian—and keeps remembering that his mother too was gentry and married a common forester.

Robin has been granted a rare holiday to go to the Nottingham Fair, where he will spend the day with his friends Much and Marian. But he is ambushed by a group of the Chief Forester’s cronies, who challenge him to an archery contest . . . and he accidentally kills one of them in self-defense.

He knows his own life is forfeit. But Much and Marian convince him that perhaps his personal catastrophe is also an opportunity: an opportunity for a few stubborn Saxons to gather together in the secret heart of Sherwood Forest and strike back against the arrogance and injustice of the Norman overlords.