Ah, nostalgia...

Nowadays, I tend to prefer fantasy and science fiction, but still enjoy other genres. However, as a little kid, I was a strict fantasy buff. There was little that could persuade me to read anything that didn't involve some kind of magic (unless it had horses... I read a lot of horse books). One of my favorite series was The Unicorn Chronicles by Bruce Coville.

Looking back now, it was a fairly generic story about a girl that is drawn into a magic land, but I loved it then and it still resides in a fond place in my heart, padded heavily with nostalgia. However, even as a kid, there were two things that drove me crazy about the Chronicles.

1) When I first found and fell in love with the series, there were only two published and that was all that had been out for several years even when I picked it up.

I waited impatiently for many years before nearly giving up on the series, only to have the third and fourth books come out very recently. Cue geek out on my part and a feeling of betrayal. It's like it was waiting for me to forget about it before it would rear up again. I beat it in terms of patience, but now that I am older, I am not able to view the new books with as much pleasure as I did the old ones. It feels rather sad actually.

2) Even as a kid, reading through them time after time and considering them the bee's knees, similarities between the Chronicles and other series were sometimes quite obvious. The first two remain mostly untarnished under the protection of my nostalgia goggles, but it was really glaring in to my older self in the recently-read third book (including, but not limited to, a scene of going underground with goblin-like creatures, seemingly taken straight out of The Hobbit.)

Yet, all in all, I still view them with a great deal of happy nostalgia. It was these books on tape that introduced me to the wonders of a full-cast recording (two words: Eh-pick!). I still luffs them, despite all their flaws.  Those flaws just happen to drive me batty.