Celtic lesbian Cinderella: ASH by Malinda Lo

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, re-reading 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.

I liked this book. But I can’t gush about it, even though I would have liked to.

It’s good enough, but what it could have been is sublime: Ash is held back by dialogue that’s often leaden, prose that’s at best humdrum and forgettable, cumbersome fairytale conventions that don’t have to be there, and a truly puzzling resolution to the heroine’s dilemma.

The book’s just what it says on the tin: a lesbian Cinderella retelling, rooted in Celtic folklore and traditions. It’s very sweet and it does feature strong female bonds, a heroine who learns strength and resilience, and a lovely relationship between two girls. And what a relationship it is. Aisling spends much of the book grieving for her dead mother, then her dead father; she immerses herself in dreams of being swept away by a handsome fairy prince to the world of the fair folk, and as a result it’s difficult to get a feel of who she is–or what she wants–until the second half of the book. She’s extremely passive, is in a near-perpetual fug of emotional death, and even her stepmother’s abuse of her is something she reacts to with distant resignation. In short, she doesn’t try very hard until… well, it’d be nice to say until she meets Kaisa but really, it’s more like until she meets Sidhean.

But it’s not that he is the impetus for her to change. Rather, he’s the means to her denouement with Kaisa, though prior to Ash’s budding friendship with the huntress it’s mostly Sidhean who provides her–a friendless orphan who knows almost nothing of the world–escape and comfort, however remote. It ought to be noted that she does feel some attraction toward him, born partly of his otherworldly glamour and partly of the glimpses of real emotion she sees in him now and again. Still, it’s only after she finds Kaisa that Ash truly tries to get out of the rut she’s in: she learns, she grows, and becomes more like a real person bit by bit. It’s a gradual development and wonderfully understated. No sudden flush of lust, no whirlwind anything. Lo takes great care in crafting the bond between the two to make sure that it’s one born of genuine friendship, trust, and care.

Amusingly, the stand-in for Prince Charming does in fact fall for Ash but, having never learned her identity, settles with some random girl instead.

Right, now the ugly.

I’m not sure if Lo is just not a very good writer or if she’s purposely dumbing her prose down to what she perceives as a reading level appropriate to young adults, but her writing’s… not very good, basically. It’s flat and dull, perfunctory, studded from end to end with cliches and workmanlike language.

She looked, she thought, like a fairy woman, and when she raised her hand to touch her face to make sure she was still flesh and blood, she saw the moonstone ring glowing as hot as fire.

At first glance, this just looks bland–and it is bland–but look closely and you have a ring that’s glowing as “hot” as fire, yet it doesn’t actually radiate warmth or indeed burn. It’s a thoughtless description; it could have been as bright as fire, or as bright as the sun, but to have it “as hot as fire” is a strange image to evoke when there’s no heat involved. It’s as if Lo simply follows cliches without really thinking them through, let alone trying to write imagery that aren’t common cliches. So it goes with most of the descriptive prose in Ash: not just banal (I’m hard-pressed to find a single simile or metaphor in this very short text that’s the least bit original), but non-functional. You otherwise have “pain and sorrow rising like a beast,” and sadness “washing over the huntress’ face” and “eyes so green at the moment it was like looking at leaves on a tree,” among other similarly deathless bits of prose. All emotions are described through eyes. No master of prose is Malinda Lo.

Next, this is a singularly generic world. Try out these place names

the Royal City

Seatown

the Wood

the Northern Mountains

West Riding

The setting isn’t so much written as very, very faintly penciled in. The fairytales are similarly generic and the fairies tick every box in the Fair Folk trope, and I can’t get a sense of the culture beyond “Generic Medieval Europelandia.” Malinda Lo honestly doesn’t even want to try. She could have at least based the place names on something Celtic, but instead we get… the Royal City. Presumably the country is called the Kingdom.

Then there’s the evil stepmother, Lady Isobel Quinn. Let’s put it this way: when your evil stepmother is less nuanced and more monodimensional than Lucrezia fucking Borgia cast in the same role, you’re in deep shit. Quinn is less horrible than some, but she still plays the role to the hilt: even before Ash’s father bites the big one she is already cold toward Ash, and once he’s dead all bets are off. She makes Ash work like a servant, then when she can no longer afford their actual servant, makes Ash do the work of two. Every now and again she slaps and screams at Ash or locks her in the cellar. I’m just baffled that a book so invested in deconstructing fairytale tropes would simply play this one so straight you can use it as a yardstick for all other renditions of evil stepmothers. I mean, it’s not really necessary. All Quinn needs to be is merely cold or indifferent, her abuse being so irrelevant and making no emotional impact on Ash.

Finally, the fairy bargain Ash strikes with Sidhean goes like so: he will grant her wishes, and in return she will be his to claim. She has her wishes, twice, before realizing that she is falling in love with Kaisa. It bears noting that Sidhean falls in love with Ash thanks to a curse–cast by Ash’s mother, by the way; thanks mom–and that he describes this love so: “It is agony.” The cringe-worthy line aside, Ash manages to escape this deal by…

By…

Okay here’s the problem: I haven’t the faintest. She goes to him one night, and tells him that if the love he bears her is real he must set her free. She adds, moreover, that she’ll be his for the night and then the curse will be broken. This… works. I’m not sure how. I’m not even sure if they even had sex, because the text is incredibly vague on that front. All I know is that somehow this shit works and Sidhean lets her go, and that… breaks the curse? I don’t know. You tell me.

So, yes, I can recommend this for a great many things–lesbian visibility (!), great female characters, and being the kind of easy read you can breeze through really quickly once you’re past the info-dumpy, leaden beginning. But it could have been so much more.