Post by wordy on Dec 4, 2010 15:51:46 GMT 10
Book Review: Ash by Malinda Lo
by kit
Ash’s (Aisling's) mother died, and was buried in The Wood, broken bread and gold coins spread about her grave so the fairies would not take her. Ash’s father loved his daughter—he had dearly loved his wife—but he married again, in time. He brought his daughter a book of fairytales, as well as a stepmother and stepsisters, each lovelier than the last. And, because we are reading that story, soon he, too, was dead.
Reviewing a fairytale is in many ways a little strange: if these are the stories you have grown up with, then it is very likely that you know what is going to happen next. Malinda Lo’s Ash, however, published in 2009, tries to give the reader a different Cinderella. And sometimes, she succeeds.
Ash is a dark, lyrical tale where a fairy gift will make you die—“But only a little”—and the heroine is gifted with the chance to love more than one person at once. As I followed her journey into orphanhood, and out of her Woodland home into a city by the coast, where fairies are declared superstitions as ‘Philosophers’ explain them away, and as I watched the abuse meted out to her by her stepmother and elder step-sister in more dread detail than in Hans Anderson or Perrault ever gave (head shaving and small, locked rooms, anyone? The writing is stylised, but the tone is dark), I was caught, as the reader, by these two loves in Ash’s suddenly small and dismal life.
The first of these is Sidhean: no prince, but a fairy godfather-brother-lover who meets all of the dark places inside Ash that open up from her grief. He is a mercurial, dangerous and beautiful creature, who holds himself back from the girl even as she drawn closer to him. His presence is a near tangible thing in the writing, for someone so elusive, and adds a tense, tricky element to the narrative.
The second—oh, the second—is Kaisa, King’s Huntress. She is a mortal woman, bright and confident and at ease in daylight places, and Ash warms to her as the bruises left by her step-family, with grief left by her state, are given time to heal. Kaisa is also responsible for a particular riverside scene that takes my young self—the girl who loved fairytales, and women, and wondered why women who also loved women never lived in these stories—to a very happy place.
These two figures are, of course, completely oppositional, and Ash soon realises that the two loves can never be reconciled. Old promises conflict with new wishes, dark with light, and ghost memories of her mother—who was also loved by those who could have her—haunt the pages.
The role of Ash’s mother is a fascinating one, actually, if you'll forgive the tangent. This fairytale so often forgets that first mother as it highlights the wickedness of the usurping one, or the fresh sadness in the father’s loss. Lo, however, gives her Cinderella room to grow, and grieve in full. What she does not do, I think, is let her character fully live. Ash is both too long, and too short, for something this rich. 291 beautifully phrased, poetic, breathless pages, but the plot is resolved, like a fairytale half its length, in the final few seconds, after an incredibly slow build. And the resolution, when it occurs, may seem rushed and slightly lopsided to anyone who, like me, has watched Ash, her fairy, and her Huntress, and felt as tangled with hope and anguish as this orphaned girl ever was.
Still, I would recommend Ash to anyone who likes old stories written with new lights, and if ‘The Prince’ was never more than a shadowy figure to you, then perhaps you shall like it all the more.