HUNTRESS, Malinda Lo

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 Taninli, 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.

I gave this one a fair chance. By page 111 out of 269, they are still traveling, the plot is going nowhere, and not only do I not care what happens next, I have developed an utmost wish for all the characters to die in a fucking fire. By page 116, I truly, truly could no longer give a fuck. Maybe it gets better–certainly it can’t get worse–but short of paying me you can’t make me endure another page of Malinda Lo’s exercise in boring people to death.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m, like, asking too much. This is a novel that features an Asian girl on the cover without indulging in cheap exoticism and general hideousness. Not only that, but as the summary indicates, it’s about two girls falling in love! What more could I ask for?

Good writing, apparently.

You may notice something a little off to start with: Taisin and Kaede are names with, erm, remarkably dissimilar linguistic provenance. To wit, one is Celtic. The other… is Japanese. It’s not the only discrepancy in the book. The setting–a small kingdom–is culturally Chinese with some Celtic thrown in. Its population sports Japanese and Celtic names in a random smattering. I don’t know about the ethnicity of the characters and I’m willing to assume everyone looks East Asian, but the problem is, this takes place in the same tiny kingdom that Ash is set in. You know, the book where there are characters with green eyes? The book where the culture is entirely Celtic and everyone has Celtic names?

What the fuck?

The excuse is that Huntress takes place 200 years before Ash but really, that doesn’t work. Malinda Lo appears to have no understanding of history or even the most elementary grasp on anthropology: how exactly did all the Chinese influences vanish over such a short period, such that the country we see in Ash no longer bears any resemblance to China? How is it that nobody in Ash bears a Japanese name? That’s setting aside the fact that Chinese and Celtic don’t mix very well to start with–there is no equivalent, as far as I know, to Anglo/Germanic elves in East Asian mythos–and it’s absolutely fucking bizarre to see a royal family where members have names like “Con Isae Tan” dining on traditional central Chinese dishes. I’m guessing that she decided she wanted to write her second book with some fantasy Chinese thrown in, which is fair enough but why not just start with a whole new setting? As things stand, the world-building of Huntress is not just sketchy, it’s incoherent.

But I could have lived with that, because this is about ASIAN LESBIAN GIRLS YAY, if only the writing was just decent and the characters not so thinly written and irritating. By the time I encountered this, I already knew it was going to be pretty bad:

A man had just been killed scarcely ten feet away, and yet all [Taisin] could think of was the jolt that went through her when she felt Kaede’s hand in hers. She had reached for her without any awareness of what she was doing. Was it already happening? Was her vision already coming true?

This, gentle readers, is the main romance of this book. The first few pages of the novel open with Taisin seeing a vision of Kaede rowing away in a boat and gaining the knowledge that she is in love with Kaede. There could be ways to make this work–to make it poignant, inevitable, something–but Lo is capable of nothing better than… this, than what I quoted. Anvilicious “will I or won’t I but what if but but nooo the vision is coming true” shit that drags on for at least 116 pages and a sharp reminder of why I don’t read YA. Of fucking course the vision will come true: it’s lazy and unnecessary, though now that I think about it Ash also had elements of this, albeit somewhat lighter. What is it with Lo? People can fall in love without having found one another in a goddamn magic dream, you know? I think that’s how most people get into a relationship even, out here in the real world, but I might just be wrong and am open to being corrected. How about it, readers? Did you find the love of your life in a dream one night? Are we in Sandman-verse?

Compounding the annoyance is the… twee nature of the romance. They blush. They look at each other. They touch accidentally, or not accidentally. Rather than building up tension and affection, the result only made me think “Go fuck already.” No really. Screw each other’s brains silly. The coyness isn’t cute; it merely irritates.

If the dialogue was stilted in Ash, it reaches an entire new level of awkwardly terribad in Huntress. Here’s some guy flirting with some girl:

“How romantic of you,” Shae said, and she might have meant for her words to sound wry, but Con heard a thread of wistfulness in her voice.

“I think it’s true,” he said. “Love knows no limits; it sees no distinctions based on birth or any other characteristic. A prince may love a seamstress as much as any princess.”

“But would the seamstress be allowed to love the prince?” Shae asked.

“Love will always prevail,” Con said. He thought he saw the hint of a blush on her face, though he couldn’t be sure, for she stirred the embers in the campfire again, and the light flared reddish-gold over her skin.

Oh no. “Love will always prevail.” No. Please to god, if this is how your characters talk you need to tear the keys off your keyboard one by one and swallow them pronto. Have some fucking decency. The prose fares little better, with passages like–

And then the child began to change. His hands were growing, his head was enlarging, and where baby fuzz had once covered a pale new scalp, now long tentacles were emerging. Parts of his body were dissolving into mist and then re-forming into a greater thing: a creature made of scales and feathers both, as if it could not decide exactly what kind of being it should be.

Can’t decide what kind of being it should be, indeed. More like a confession that you, the author, doesn’t possess the remotest hint of imagination. Really there are many, many ways to go about describing weird shit, but concluding with a flat “dunno what it’s supposed to be lol” note is not it. The prose remains at this consistent level of mediocrity, giving us pulchritudinous phrases like “sludgy black sadness” and similes like “as dark as a thousand starless midnights.” (I wasn’t aware midnight is any darker than, say, 10 PM. Or 2 AM.) I tried and tried, but couldn’t locate even a single sentence fragment that suggests Lo has ever made acquaintance with language that’s any better than relentlessly boring or painfully unimaginative. Everything is relayed through a cliché; each image aspires to height no greater than the oily sludge of banality.

It doesn’t help that, of all the 116 pages I read, the Fellowship of Zzzzz spend their time doing nothing but traipsing across the landscape. What does the landscape look like? I haven’t the faintest, because Malinda Lo’s world-building can be kindly described as “incompetent.” I’m not asking for landscape writing ala Tolkien–I spit upon his name even–but it’s telling that after over a hundred pages (and for that matter, previous acquaintance through another book) I still have no inkling of the country’s size, politics, or culture beyond that it’s a randomized clusterfuck of non-meshing Chinese and Celtic pick-and-mix. Speaking of which, I’m not even sure how many people are in this band of whatever it is they are. I vaguely know their names, but so help me I can’t tell them apart. Even Taisin and Kaede are not particularly distinct and, again, it can be pretty tough to tell which girl is which unless there’s a scene where she handles a knife or a bow (in which case it’s Kaede) or a book/magical powers (in which case it is Taisin, probably). Seeing that they come from very different families, and are supposed to have fairly different interests and life aspirations, it’s distressing that they act so much alike and are equally flat. I have a vague idea that they are traveling to see the Fairy Queen, but beyond that I can’t tell you much about these people, what they want, what they fear, what makes them feel vaguely like human beings instead of words on paper.

I think I have an inkling of how the story will go, and how it may get better, if I had just gritted my teeth through until they arrive in fairyland. It may even be tragic and emotionally compelling. I don’t know. But I don’t care. I don’t want to read anymore of this. I just wanted to delete the book and pretend I never wasted so many hours on it as I did.

To be fair, it’s hugely progressive to see not only an Asian girl on the cover of a YA book, but a backcover synopsis that makes it patently obvious the girls are lesbians. It doesn’t subject them to the male gaze, and for the most part the Chinese bits are not controlled by the white gaze the way it is in Pon’s Silver Phoenix. Despite all that, this is a case where no amount of doing it so right–lesbian, non-Eurocentric, POC–will overcome the hurdle of painfully average-to-bad writing. I want to like it, I feel bad for not liking it, but you know what? When I decided at last that I was done with this, my immediate reaction was one of intense relief.