Making Connections

Pegasus
Robin McKinley

   'A part of that discomfort was her relentless sense of herself as wrong, as alien -- stiff and clumsy, a grotesque unnatural shape and freakishly unbalanced posture (how ridiculous to spend all your life rearing!). And bald. And wingless....She felt her arms -- her forelegs -- flapping foolishly at her sides; how bizarre human shoulders were, pulling the forelegs apart and forcing them to dangle.' (McKinley, Pegasus 266)

   In this book, there is an Alliance between humans and pegasi, an Alliance that is strengthed by the binding of each king's children to the children of the other. Sylvi and Ebon have a better binding than most -- they can actually talk to each other. For her sixteenth birthday, Ebon decides to take Sylvi to his homeland of Rhiandomeer, where she is the only human in a land of pegasi. In all the time Sylvi spends in the pegasus lands, she is constantly reminded of how ungraceful humans are. She's different, and you get that same feeling whenever you go somewhere where you are obviously a foreigner -- even just to Quebec. When everyone around you is speaking French (which always seems to sound so much smoother than English) and you're speaking English, you feel like you stick out like a sore thumb. That's one thing reading this book reminds me of.
(Picture from http://lamiastellina.altervista.org/pegasus/pegasus.html)