It wasn’t until after I read it that I began to remember names and situations, and to wonder where I had heard them before. I found Dealing with Dragons a year or so later, a cheap paperback with a really bad cover, sitting on the shelf at an opshop. I didn’t yet know about the thing called Worldbuilding, but I was already beginning to appreciate it. I loved the stupid yet clever princess, who was determined to ensnare a man. I loved the way Patricia Wrede bent her fractured fairy-tales, imbuing Daystar with a kind of practical wisdom learned by rote from his mother Cimorene and I loved watching Shiara’s bursts of temper that derailed the good his manners had achieved. That was in Queensland, when you could still check out fifteen books at a time, and I always had a full card. I picked it up at my local library one day, enchanted by the gorgeous watercolour cover that was all muted greens and greys until it got to Shiara’s flaming hair, and added it to my already high stack of books. As far as I recall, the first book of hers that I read was the last of the Enchanted Forest Quartet: Talking To Dragons. Wrede has been part of the Top Three since before I even knew I had a Top Three. Wrede, Steven Brust, Jane Austen, Terry Pratchett, Kate Stradling, Alexadre Dumas, Lloyd Alexander, Lillian Beckwith, Gail Carson Levine, Robert Louis Stevenson and so on? It crosses most genres (though you might have noticed a decided tendency toward fantasy) and quite a few centuries as well. By necessity it is a fluid top three: how else could I fit in Diana Wynne Jones, Patricia C.
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