Malinda Lo

Ash — (2009) Young adult. Publisher: Cinderella retold. In the wake of her father's death, Ash is left at the mercy of her cruel stepmother. Consumed with grief, her only joy comes by the light of the dying hearth fire, rereading the fairy tales her mother once told her. In her dreams, someday the fairies will steal her away, as they are said to do. When she meets the dark and dangerous fairy Sidhean, she believes that her wish may be granted. The day that Ash meets Kaisa, the King's Huntress, her heart begins to change. Instead of chasing fairies, Ash learns to hunt with Kaisa. Though their friendship is as delicate as a new bloom, it reawakens Ash's capacity for love — and her desire to live. But Sidhean has already claimed Ash for his own, and she must make a choice between fairy tale dreams and true love. Entrancing, empowering, and romantic, Ash is about the connection between life and love, and solitude and death, where transformation can come from even the deepest grief.

Ash

Malinda Lo combines several highly creative ideas in her debut novel, Ash. We all know the tale of Cinderella, but it’s never been told quite like this. Cinderella (here called Aisling, Ash for short) falls for a young woman instead of the prince. And the fairy who helps Ash break free of her stepmother is no rosy-cheeked godmother, but a coldly beautiful fairy lord right out of the older, darker legends of the fey folk, and he demands a steep price for his aid. On paper, I love everything about this concept, and I also liked Lo’s writing:

“She walked this way for a long time, but the light did not change; it seemed to always be morning. The sun continued its bright blinking overhead, and when shafts of golden light came through the leafy canopy, dust motes hung in the air, glittering as bright as diamonds. It was an enchantment, she was sure. This wood was so gentle in comparison to the dark, thick forests near Rook Hill. There, the evergreens were so tall and so old she could not see the tops of them; here, oak and birch branches broke the sky into lacy filigrees of light green, exposing the tender blue above.”

The major conflict is an intriguing one. Ash isn’t just choosing between two particular suitors. Her attraction to the fairy lord, Sidhean, is based largely on the oblivion he can give her. In her grief for her mother, Ash thinks this is what she wants. Kaisa, the King’s Huntress who becomes her other love interest, represents life in all its vivid joys and pains.

Unfortunately, Ash never quite grabbed me. Part of the problem is that it just takes a long time for the plot to get rolling. For much of the first half of the book, Ash spends most of her time brooding and/or wandering in the woods. While crucial plot points are set up during this time, they don’t come to fruition until much later. Lo’s descriptions of the woods are beautiful, but I grew impatient with the cycle of depression — wandering — depression — wandering…

Then there’s a part of me that wonders why this story needed, well, Cinderella. Maybe if Ash were choosing between the Huntress and the prince, or if Sidhean himself were the prince and Ash fled from a fairy ball rather than a human one, or if an eligible princess held a ball to meet potential husbands and found Ash instead, the Cinderella story would fit better. As it is, the prince/ball/midnight stuff feels a little tacked on. The prince is never in the running for Ash’s affections, and almost doesn’t need to be here at all.

And some of the less satisfying aspects of the plot occur when Lo is trying to fit the Cinderella story and her own story together. For example, Ash finds a fairy path through the forest that takes her back, in less than a day’s journey, to her home village, where I can think of at least two people who would have taken her in. Sidhean sends her back to her stepmother’s house every time she makes the trip, ostensibly because she’s breaking fairy rules, but also because this is a Cinderella story and she can’t escape her stepmother or else it’ll be a different story. So, Ash ends up staying there, long after it starts seeming out of character.

Then again, Malinda Lo states on her website that she started with a more standard Cinderella story and only later realized her heroine was a lesbian, so I’m probably off-base in complaining about the Cinderella elements.

All of my complaints aside, Ash is a promising and creative debut with a lot of great things going for it. I will definitely look for later books by Malinda Lo in the future. —Kelly Lasiter

Huntress — (2011) Young adult. Prequel to Ash. Publisher: Nature is out of balance in the human world. The sun hasn't shone in years, and crops are failing. Worse yet, strange and hostile creatures have begun to appear. The people's survival hangs in the balance. To solve the crisis, the oracle stones are cast, and Kaede and Taisin, two seventeen-year-old girls, are picked to go on a dangerous and unheard-of journey to Tanlili, the city of the Fairy Queen. Taisin is a sage, thrumming with magic, and Kaede is of the earth, without a speck of the otherworldly. And yet the two girls' destinies are drawn together during the mission. As members of their party succumb to unearthly attacks and fairy tricks, the two come to rely on each other and even begin to fall in love. But the Kingdom needs only one huntress to save it, and what it takes could tear Kaede and Taisin apart forever. The exciting adventure prequel to Malinda Lo's highly acclaimed novel Ash is overflowing with lush Chinese influences and details inspired by the I Ching, and is filled with action and romance.

Huntress

Huntress is a prequel to Malinda Lo’s debut novel, Ash, though the two books can stand independently. Huntress takes place several centuries earlier, in a time when the country’s culture was more analogous to that of feudal China.

In the past few years, a shift in the weather has resulted in famine. Then the Fairy Queen, who has long been out of contact with humans, issues a surprising invitation to her city, Taninli. The King and the sages are sure the timing is no coincidence, and put together a delegation. Among those chosen to undertake this hazardous journey are Kaede and Taisin, two seventeen-year-old girls growing up in the sages’ Academy.

Along the way, the girls begin to fall in love. There’s no stigma attached to being a lesbian in the world of the novel, but other obstacles loom. Kaede is high-born and her father plans a political marriage for her. Taisin has planned all her life to become a sage, and sages are required to be celibate. The theme of forbidden love is picked up in a secondary couple, too, and in a folktale told around the travelers’ campfire. Seen from a certain angle, even the backstory of the villain’s origin is an extension of the theme of “love thwarted by an accident of birth.”

The best thing about Huntress is that nothing in it is a cop-out. Anytime there’s the possibility of an easy way out, that’s not where Lo takes the story. No one ever hands Kaede and Taisin a convenient way to have everything they want without sacrifice. This holds true, too, for the struggle against the supernatural force that threatens the land. The threats cannot be handily dehumanized. Killing never becomes easy. This lack of cop-outs makes Huntress stand out against a number of books that foreshadow difficult choices but don’t follow through; against any book where the bad guys are made of cardboard; and even against Ash, where the solution was something of a loophole.

Don’t think, though, that this is a depressing book. Huntress is filled with noble characters, beautiful imagery, and selfless love; and left me feeling uplifted after I finished it.

At the end, we also see the implied founding of the King’s Huntress position that Kaisa, from Ash, will later hold.

Lo’s prose feels more assured this time around. It’s less ornamented than that of Ash, but also more seamless. There are fewer passages that jump out as “Here be pretty words!” — because it all flows together as a whole, elegant in an understated way. I usually read quickly but slowed down for Huntress, so I could “hear” the words spoken in my head.

The only aspect of the prose that seems flawed is the occasional head-hopping, and I can’t even say for sure that it’s a mistake. In the early chapters, it’s distracting. Later, the reader grows accustomed to it. Then, when the characters reach Taninli and walk out into the sunshine, Lo uses the POV-jumping to show us each character’s initial reaction in a single paragraph. It works perfectly, serving both to illuminate differences between the characters and to give the reader a multisensory experience. I have to wonder if Lo seeded the head-hopping early in the novel so it wouldn’t jar us when she did it purposefully here.

My metaphorical hat is off to Malinda Lo for this bittersweet tale of love, heroism, sacrifice, and coming-of-age. (And also for proving to jaded old me that I can still enjoy the quest structure if other elements of the story are fresh.) I highly recommend Huntress. —Kelly Lasiter