Huntress by Malinda Lo
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- Why I read it: fantasy, I Ching, faeries, kickass heroines, author's Twitter presence, girls who like girls
- Disclosure: Bought a copy from my local indie bookstore. Yay!
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.
Ever since
Ash bowled me over last year (you can read my review
here), I've been dying for
Huntress. There's something about Lo's style - dense, lyrical, and falling somewhere in the literary crossover sub-genre of YA - that I can't get enough of in a genre so many authors seem to think they need to write down for. Even when I don't enjoy her work I enjoy its freshness of voice, and
Huntress is no exception, even though I didn't love it quite as much as
Ash.
Perhaps its greatest asset and greatest flaw at once is the freedom Lo seems to have been given (or taken) to tell the story she wants to tell.
Ash may have had the subversive selling point of being "the lesbian Cinderella story," but it also seems cautious; a testing-the-waters sort of book. Sure, Ash fell in love with Kaisa, which is not your typical Eurocentric fairy-tale ending, but the rest of the novel felt straight out of Brothers Grimm, especially in its careful avoidance of any explicit description of race or ethnicity.
Not so
Huntress, which is an explosive mix of East and West and many cultures in between in its worldbuilding and characters, not to mention the almost zany touch to the roller coaster plotting. On one hand, I loved it - YA needs more books that elude pigeonholing as effectively as this one does. On the other hand, it occasionally read like someone playing in a sandbox; testing boundaries and see how far they could go before readers revolted. I'd always rather read an author trying something new instead of falling into same-old-same-old, but I admit I'm a little nervous to see where Lo takes us after this one. Will she lean more towards the fantasy adventure story, the girl-meets-girl story, or the multicultural story? Or will she find a more comfortable middle ground in between?
Huntress has left me wondering.
Other than that (admittedly tiny) awkwardness, this book is an almost flawless and beautiful fantasy story that captured me utterly. Despite slow pacing that would make it a tough choice for readers who like their YA more in the style of, say,
The Hunger Games, I found it even more pleasantly addicting than
Ash. The best thing about it is its refusal to indulge in tropes, or when it must, its ability to turn them neatly on their heads, as in this conversation on page 26 about political marriages:
Kaede sighed. "I can't marry this Lord Win."
"Why not?" Fin's expression was blandly curious.
Kaede pulled a face. "Fin, I could never marry any man, you know that."
Fin gave her the dagger again. "Kaede, you should realize that the chances of your making a political marriage with another woman are - well, it is unlikely. It has happened before, but you know that it's rare."
In the face of a genre (fantasy) that so often flatly ignores or even denies LGBTQ issues altogether, that conversation is so. Much. Fistpump. Which brings me to what the biggest talking point about this book is (again): its lesbian romance. As someone who now feels comfortable admitting she likes girls as well as boys, I fell in love with both Kaede and Taisin a little bit. They were wonderful, strong, beautiful characters that made wonderful romantic interests for each other. But honestly? I didn't think the romance was even that much a part of the book, and I think even someone uncomfortable with lesbian themes in other contexts could enjoy it for the adventure story, or the worldbuilding, or the whole host of other things that made this book fantastic.
If I hadn't been loving the book before, its ending - open-ended and heartbreaking, in the style of the so many Eastern fairy and folk tales that helped inspire it - just cemented my hero worship of Malinda Lo. She took incredible risks with this book, and while not all of them paid off, it remains too many kinds of awesome to name. Without a doubt, this is one of the best books of 2011. It's a stand-alone, too, so even if you haven't read
Ash you have no excuse to miss it!
Five out of five stars.
That's why I'm surprised with the odd little love affair I seem to be having with books published by Carolrhoda Lab, a YA division in Lerner Publishing Group. I'd read not one but three books by them in quick succession - What Can(t) Wait by Ashley Hope Perez, Brooklyn, Burning by Steve Brezenoff, and The Freak Observer by Blythe Woolston - and adored all three.
