the Hero's Crown to Tor, she helps defeat the Northerners, but at the cost of many lives, including Arlbeth's. Aerin, with Tor's help, finally rids the kingdom of Maur's evil skull, but in the process the skull turns Damar into a desert. Aerin marries Tor, whom she truly loves in her own way, and they help rebuild the kingdom together as its rulers. Characters Genre and style The Hero and the Crown was part of a shift in young adult fantasy in the late 20th century: "a sudden flowering of heroines", according to scholars Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn. In many earlier works of high fantasy, it was perceived as unrealistic for women to play a dominant role in a medieval world, and female characters were often absent, relegated to minor roles or seen only in group settings. This changed around a decade after the women's movement of the 1960s, when writers such as Patricia McKillip, Robin McKinley and Tamora Pierce entered the genre. Scholar Leah Phillips calls the subgenre that emerged "mythopoeic YA", while Michele Fry describes the Damar tales as "feminized quests" that blended female leads with conventionally masculine quest narratives. McKinley was influenced by the heroic quests of J. R. R. Tolkien, but felt disappointed by the women in his work with the exception of Éowyn, who she admired. Referring to the characters she wanted to write as "girls who do things", she said in her Newbery Medal speech that she had "wished desperately for books like Hero when I was young, books that didn’t require me to be untrue to my gender if I wished to fantasize about having my sort of adventures". Her protagonist Aerin is not a traditionally beautiful princess, but an athletic one; she engages in outdoor activities, in particular riding horses. Through Aerin's bond with a horse named Talat, the story features the motif of a tomboyish female lead with an animal companion, a recurring trait in McKinley's work. Reception In a retrospective essay about the Newbery Medal-winning books from 1976 to 1985, literary critic Zena Sutherland wrote, "Long and intermittently intricate, the story impresses by its scope and sweep and by its narrative power rather than by the depth of its characterization; it has many familiar folkloric elements, but they are put together with considerable industry and some panache." In a 2016 essay for Tor.com, novelist Ilana C. Myer wrote, "Ultimately,