![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Ash, by Malinda Lo
Ash, by Malinda Lo
Aisling, also called Ash, is devastated when her mother dies. Things only get worse when her father dies as well, leaving her in the hands of her stepmother Isobel. Isobel forces Ash to pay off her father's debts through servitude, and eventually Ash is serving as gardener, housekeeper and lady's maid to Isobel and her social-climbing daughter Ana. Ash's only solace is the Woods... where she meets both a fairy man who knew her mother, and the King's Huntress, Kaisa, who shares her love of the Wood and of fairy stories and who sees past her withdrawn demeanor.
This book was introduced to me as a lesbian Cinderella retelling, which is a totally accurate description, and that description alone was enough to make me read the book. I have long had a fondness for fairy tale retellings, and one that subverted the heteronormative assumptions of most of them sounded delightful. So I was really eager to like this book.
And there are some things I do like about it. I still love the idea. The depiction of the woods, and the fairies, worked for me very much; it's mysterious and dangerous without being over the top. But my favorite thing is Kaisa, who I found very compelling: her position as the King's Huntress intrigued me from the start, and I loved her kindness and courage. I found her completely believable as a love interest, and I liked the slow progression of her romance with Ash. She was a liminal character: not quite part of society, not quite part of the Wood, and I liked her very much.
Unfortunately, Kaisa wasn't the protagonist. Ash was. And Ash, unlike Kaisa, was curiously passive. Part of that, I think, was the shape of the Cinderella narrative: Ash couldn't run away or otherwise materially change her situation, because she had to walk through the paces of the story framework. She bore her trials with stoicism, which is not in itself problematic, but she didn't actually do anything about them. And the way she related to her 'fairy godfather' didn't work for me in ways that I'll describe under the cut, because they're spoilery. Had this been the story of Kaisa, King's Huntress, navigating her liminal position, falling in love, standing in the space between human Ash and the inhuman fairies, I think I would have loved it. As it was, I found myself frustrated that the major character rarely if ever tried to influence her own future.
The other problem that I had was with the prose. I like both "transparent" prose and stylized or ornate. Unfortunately, this book fell somewhere in the middle: I couldn't quite see through the prose to the world of the story (as I would with transparent prose), nor was it quite stylized enough for me to admire the words for themselves. As it was, I felt as though there was a thin but solid layer of glass between me and the characters.
The biggest problem that I had was that I put down the book and couldn't remember much of anything Ash had done to affect her situation. Her mother died; her father remarried; her father died; her stepmother made her a servant. She went along, passively, without trying to do anything: argue with her stepmother, ask the greenwitch (who was on good terms with her mother!) to intercede, ask the fairies (who she encountered a few times even this early in the book) to intercede, run away and start a new life elsewhere. (The last is particularly notable, because she does recommend that her stepsister Clara, who is not thrilled with the idea of marrying for money, run away and take up a trade. Clara rejects this, but it really made me stop and wonder why Ash didn't try the exact same thing!) And of course, to a certain extent those things have to happen because it is, in fact, a Cinderella story. But I would have been much happier if she'd tried, even if she didn't succeed.
To be fair, she does try to run away, once. She runs straight into the Woods, is found by the fairy Sidhean, chastised, and is taken back. But she never tries again, nor does she attempt running away somewhere else.
There was a twist that I did enjoy. Rather than a benevolent but somewhat deus ex machina fairy godmother, Ash's fairy aid was self-interested. Sidhean's assistance in getting Ash to the hunt and the ball came with a price: she would be taken away to the fairy kingdom, with him, forever. She agrees, and it isn't as insane as it might at first appear, because her life is so miserable that being stolen away elsewhere is pretty attractive. (Once again, I wonder why she doesn't do what she told Clara to do and run off to apprentice herself to someone, like her mother's greenwitch friend, but that's neither here nor there.) So she does have to ask for what she wants (the trip to the ball, to see Kaisa one more time), and she has to agree to the price.
But that brings me to another problem: the ending. You see, the reason Sidhean wants to steal her away and is willing to bargain with her to do it is that he's love with her. Furthermore, this love is described as all-encompassing, very painful, and, crucially, something he'd never experienced before: fairies don't appear to normally fall in love, and the fact that he did so this time was due to a curse. (There's some creepiness with this, because he claims to be in love with her but he talks about it purely in terms of owning her, but I suppose that when you're dealing with an immortal and supremely powerful being who's in love for the very first time ever and has no idea how to handle it, that's to be expected, although not lauded.) Unfortunately, shortly after Ash agrees to go with him, she falls in love with Kaisa (and realizes that Kaisa has been in love with her for a long time). This is the point at which, I felt, the plot ought to pick up! Ash ought to do something to decide what she's going to honor (her love for Kaisa or her promise to Sidhean) and, if she decides not to go with Sidhean, how she will escape him, since he's a powerful fairy.
But as soon as Ash realizes that she's in love with Kaisa, she realizes that people in love will do anything to make their beloved happy. Therefore she just has to ask Sidhean to let her go and he will. So she does, and she agrees to spend one dreamlike night in fairy (which, to my disappointment, actually was just one night; I was hoping she'd wake up to find that a year had passed or something), and then he just... lets her go, so she can go back to Kaisa.
She doesn't even have to confront her stepmother, the Big Bad of the whole book. (Who went from zero to eeeeeevil in about five pages, but I'll let that go as a trope of the genre.) She just goes back home, says goodbye to Clara without even seeing Isobel or Ana, and goes to join Kaisa.
Now. Had Sidhean been in love with her for some reason that had to do with her—had he been impressed with her heart or her intelligence or her strength or her caring, or, really, anything—this might've been a satisfying ending. Ash, by virtue of her awesomeness, has the clout to ask Sidhean to free her, and he does. But since he was in love with her thanks to a curse, there isn't even that. So the biggest complication of the book (how will she get out of her ill-advised bargain so that she can be with the woman she loves?) evaporates. And the secondary major complication (how will she escape the stepmother who traps and abuses her?) is a nonissue.
I really wish the book had been told from Kaisa's point of view. I think that would have been truly fascinating. But Ash just didn't work for me, because she was so passive.
All this isn't to say it was a bad book. I did enjoy it. It's just that I wish Ash had been even a little bit more, well, proactive.
Aisling, also called Ash, is devastated when her mother dies. Things only get worse when her father dies as well, leaving her in the hands of her stepmother Isobel. Isobel forces Ash to pay off her father's debts through servitude, and eventually Ash is serving as gardener, housekeeper and lady's maid to Isobel and her social-climbing daughter Ana. Ash's only solace is the Woods... where she meets both a fairy man who knew her mother, and the King's Huntress, Kaisa, who shares her love of the Wood and of fairy stories and who sees past her withdrawn demeanor.
This book was introduced to me as a lesbian Cinderella retelling, which is a totally accurate description, and that description alone was enough to make me read the book. I have long had a fondness for fairy tale retellings, and one that subverted the heteronormative assumptions of most of them sounded delightful. So I was really eager to like this book.
And there are some things I do like about it. I still love the idea. The depiction of the woods, and the fairies, worked for me very much; it's mysterious and dangerous without being over the top. But my favorite thing is Kaisa, who I found very compelling: her position as the King's Huntress intrigued me from the start, and I loved her kindness and courage. I found her completely believable as a love interest, and I liked the slow progression of her romance with Ash. She was a liminal character: not quite part of society, not quite part of the Wood, and I liked her very much.
Unfortunately, Kaisa wasn't the protagonist. Ash was. And Ash, unlike Kaisa, was curiously passive. Part of that, I think, was the shape of the Cinderella narrative: Ash couldn't run away or otherwise materially change her situation, because she had to walk through the paces of the story framework. She bore her trials with stoicism, which is not in itself problematic, but she didn't actually do anything about them. And the way she related to her 'fairy godfather' didn't work for me in ways that I'll describe under the cut, because they're spoilery. Had this been the story of Kaisa, King's Huntress, navigating her liminal position, falling in love, standing in the space between human Ash and the inhuman fairies, I think I would have loved it. As it was, I found myself frustrated that the major character rarely if ever tried to influence her own future.
The other problem that I had was with the prose. I like both "transparent" prose and stylized or ornate. Unfortunately, this book fell somewhere in the middle: I couldn't quite see through the prose to the world of the story (as I would with transparent prose), nor was it quite stylized enough for me to admire the words for themselves. As it was, I felt as though there was a thin but solid layer of glass between me and the characters.
The biggest problem that I had was that I put down the book and couldn't remember much of anything Ash had done to affect her situation. Her mother died; her father remarried; her father died; her stepmother made her a servant. She went along, passively, without trying to do anything: argue with her stepmother, ask the greenwitch (who was on good terms with her mother!) to intercede, ask the fairies (who she encountered a few times even this early in the book) to intercede, run away and start a new life elsewhere. (The last is particularly notable, because she does recommend that her stepsister Clara, who is not thrilled with the idea of marrying for money, run away and take up a trade. Clara rejects this, but it really made me stop and wonder why Ash didn't try the exact same thing!) And of course, to a certain extent those things have to happen because it is, in fact, a Cinderella story. But I would have been much happier if she'd tried, even if she didn't succeed.
To be fair, she does try to run away, once. She runs straight into the Woods, is found by the fairy Sidhean, chastised, and is taken back. But she never tries again, nor does she attempt running away somewhere else.
There was a twist that I did enjoy. Rather than a benevolent but somewhat deus ex machina fairy godmother, Ash's fairy aid was self-interested. Sidhean's assistance in getting Ash to the hunt and the ball came with a price: she would be taken away to the fairy kingdom, with him, forever. She agrees, and it isn't as insane as it might at first appear, because her life is so miserable that being stolen away elsewhere is pretty attractive. (Once again, I wonder why she doesn't do what she told Clara to do and run off to apprentice herself to someone, like her mother's greenwitch friend, but that's neither here nor there.) So she does have to ask for what she wants (the trip to the ball, to see Kaisa one more time), and she has to agree to the price.
But that brings me to another problem: the ending. You see, the reason Sidhean wants to steal her away and is willing to bargain with her to do it is that he's love with her. Furthermore, this love is described as all-encompassing, very painful, and, crucially, something he'd never experienced before: fairies don't appear to normally fall in love, and the fact that he did so this time was due to a curse. (There's some creepiness with this, because he claims to be in love with her but he talks about it purely in terms of owning her, but I suppose that when you're dealing with an immortal and supremely powerful being who's in love for the very first time ever and has no idea how to handle it, that's to be expected, although not lauded.) Unfortunately, shortly after Ash agrees to go with him, she falls in love with Kaisa (and realizes that Kaisa has been in love with her for a long time). This is the point at which, I felt, the plot ought to pick up! Ash ought to do something to decide what she's going to honor (her love for Kaisa or her promise to Sidhean) and, if she decides not to go with Sidhean, how she will escape him, since he's a powerful fairy.
But as soon as Ash realizes that she's in love with Kaisa, she realizes that people in love will do anything to make their beloved happy. Therefore she just has to ask Sidhean to let her go and he will. So she does, and she agrees to spend one dreamlike night in fairy (which, to my disappointment, actually was just one night; I was hoping she'd wake up to find that a year had passed or something), and then he just... lets her go, so she can go back to Kaisa.
She doesn't even have to confront her stepmother, the Big Bad of the whole book. (Who went from zero to eeeeeevil in about five pages, but I'll let that go as a trope of the genre.) She just goes back home, says goodbye to Clara without even seeing Isobel or Ana, and goes to join Kaisa.
Now. Had Sidhean been in love with her for some reason that had to do with her—had he been impressed with her heart or her intelligence or her strength or her caring, or, really, anything—this might've been a satisfying ending. Ash, by virtue of her awesomeness, has the clout to ask Sidhean to free her, and he does. But since he was in love with her thanks to a curse, there isn't even that. So the biggest complication of the book (how will she get out of her ill-advised bargain so that she can be with the woman she loves?) evaporates. And the secondary major complication (how will she escape the stepmother who traps and abuses her?) is a nonissue.
I really wish the book had been told from Kaisa's point of view. I think that would have been truly fascinating. But Ash just didn't work for me, because she was so passive.
All this isn't to say it was a bad book. I did enjoy it. It's just that I wish Ash had been even a little bit more, well, proactive.
no subject
...huh. That was not what I was expecting.
PS. I have continued my re-watch of X. Wow, it is so much slashier than I remembered!
no subject
I actually did like the portrayal of fairy and of the fairy-haunted Wood, but Sidhean's relationship with Ash was very, very strange, and felt out of place in the book. Especially when he just gave her up at the end.
I can't shake the feeling that this story would have been far better if Lo hadn't tied it to the Cinderella formula. A story about a brave and compassionate King's Huntress and her slow-growing relationship with a girl beloved of/in thrall of the fairies could have been really wonderful. But then, on the other hand, she wouldn't have had the immediate high-concept nature of 'lesbian Cinderella.'
no subject
All in all this sounds like one of those frustrating books that could have done with another stage of editing to bring it all together and polish it.
no subject
But, yeah, the lack of any agenda, the lack of any attempt to try to change things, really put me off.
I do think it would have been improved by one more draft, to sharpen up the conflict.
no subject
This made me appreciate the movie Ever After as a Cinderella retelling a little bit more. Not that I don't already have a special place in my heart for Ever After after visiting the Loire Valley.
no subject