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attackfishThose poor hapless bookstore employees, I just kept badgering them about getting this book, I was looking forward to it that much. And I read it right away, all those... months... ago. Yeah, I’ve been ignoring the blog side of things over here.
After Ash’s mother’s death, her father has married again, to a woman Ash despises. And for good reason. As soon as her father dies, her new stepmother and stepsisters start to treat her like a servant and trample on the last remnants of her mother in the customs of the house. When they leave for the city to snare husbands for the daughters, they take Ash along as a lady’s maid. But Ash meets the King’s Huntress, and for the first time since her mom died feels wanted again...
At its heart, Cinderella is a romance. It never was my favorite fairy tale, because to me it always seemed like Cinderella was less in love with the prince than she was in desperate need to get away from her abusive family, so any novel that handles Cinderella has to deal with that before I can even begin to like it. Lo could have switched the romantic focus to the Huntress without changing that underlying problem.
But she didn’t. She wove meetings of the Huntress and Ash into the story, and gave Ash as reason to be in love. She could have escaped from her family with the prince, she could have escaped into the fairy court, but instead she chose the Huntress. She chose who she wanted instead of just who wanted her.
Add to this that Lo has written some of the most vivid descriptions of the woods Ash travelled through, and the townhouse and the parties, the balls, and the Huntress’ camp, that even though I live in the middle of the bright, sunny, open desert, I felt like I was really in the middle of the dark, secretive woods, or the quiet, low ceilinged attic rooms, and Lo has written a fine book.
Lo’s prose is beautiful. I’d read it even if there weren’t a story attached to it. But there is a story, and it’s one of the best renderings of Cinderella I’ve ever read, even if Ash doesn’t fall in love with the prince. Maybe especially because Ash doesn’t fall in love with the prince.
More than the story, the magical elements, and the debate between the old religion of Ash and her mom and the new religion of the colonials and the royals drew me in. It’s this subtle, delicate worldbuilding that gives the story a backdrop and a feel. When Ash’s upperclass, snotty, colonial style stepsister comes to her and her faith for a spell, I grinned so hard my mom started finding that book with all the psychiatrists’ numbers in it again.
My one real complaint is that the dialogue is clunky. It doesn’t read in most parts, especially when the huntress is talking to Ash like real people are talking. It also didn’t feel all that different from the prose, and it made it hard to connect with characters other than Ash. It made it more difficult to connect to the romance than it should have been.
In some ways, this book felt a lot like reading one of Robin Mckinley’s fairy tales. It has an air of mystery to it that draws the reader in and acts as a veil between the reader and everything that happens. It’s a feel to the book that adds more to the world than anything else. The clunkiness of the dialogue actually became something like an asset in this, because it added to the veil and made me as a reader feel like I was somewhere very different from here. It’s pleasant escapism.
It’s a sort of escape that tells a lot about our world though. Lo gives us a world where women who like other women aren’t just accepted and normal, but one in which there are myths and stories, fairy tales even, that get told about them and their loves, and their exploits, and their daring deeds. It’s a world where most people are straight, but it’s not even commented on when someone isn’t. There were holes in this, a heteronormativity that kept women marrying for money and fairy tale type gender norms, but it was a welcome, healthy relief for me, and probably is for other queer women and girls to just enter a world for a while where we can breathe.
It offers escape in another way. It offers escape from so much of popular culture where even if a girl’s lucky enough to have the lead, she’s the only one with an important part. All the other characters who mean something are boys. All her friends and sidekicks, and most of her enemies are boys, and if there are other girls around, they’re just not that important. Ash has girls everywhere. For once it’s the boys who are forgettable and unimportant, and you know what? I didn’t even notice it until I was finished.
In the end, I really didn’t care about the romantic elements, because I was too busy engaging with the vivid descriptive passages. I enjoyed myself thoroughly, I fell in love with Ash, and I wanted to explore the world some more. That actually says kind of a lot about a book that didn’t press any of my usual buttons. There are no real politics, as Ash isn’t in a position to be exposed to any, there’s no particularly interesting anthropology, and there are no battle scenes. Still I enjoyed it. Must be the feel, because I loved it.
The one thing I noticed, in a book full of lesbian women, there weren’t any gay men. Of course, this can be forgiven, as there were almost no men at all. It’s definitely not a book to give to a young man, gay or straight. Young girls on the other hand... *grin* Well I enjoyed it, anyway.
After Ash’s mother’s death, her father has married again, to a woman Ash despises. And for good reason. As soon as her father dies, her new stepmother and stepsisters start to treat her like a servant and trample on the last remnants of her mother in the customs of the house. When they leave for the city to snare husbands for the daughters, they take Ash along as a lady’s maid. But Ash meets the King’s Huntress, and for the first time since her mom died feels wanted again...
At its heart, Cinderella is a romance. It never was my favorite fairy tale, because to me it always seemed like Cinderella was less in love with the prince than she was in desperate need to get away from her abusive family, so any novel that handles Cinderella has to deal with that before I can even begin to like it. Lo could have switched the romantic focus to the Huntress without changing that underlying problem.
But she didn’t. She wove meetings of the Huntress and Ash into the story, and gave Ash as reason to be in love. She could have escaped from her family with the prince, she could have escaped into the fairy court, but instead she chose the Huntress. She chose who she wanted instead of just who wanted her.
Add to this that Lo has written some of the most vivid descriptions of the woods Ash travelled through, and the townhouse and the parties, the balls, and the Huntress’ camp, that even though I live in the middle of the bright, sunny, open desert, I felt like I was really in the middle of the dark, secretive woods, or the quiet, low ceilinged attic rooms, and Lo has written a fine book.
Lo’s prose is beautiful. I’d read it even if there weren’t a story attached to it. But there is a story, and it’s one of the best renderings of Cinderella I’ve ever read, even if Ash doesn’t fall in love with the prince. Maybe especially because Ash doesn’t fall in love with the prince.
More than the story, the magical elements, and the debate between the old religion of Ash and her mom and the new religion of the colonials and the royals drew me in. It’s this subtle, delicate worldbuilding that gives the story a backdrop and a feel. When Ash’s upperclass, snotty, colonial style stepsister comes to her and her faith for a spell, I grinned so hard my mom started finding that book with all the psychiatrists’ numbers in it again.
My one real complaint is that the dialogue is clunky. It doesn’t read in most parts, especially when the huntress is talking to Ash like real people are talking. It also didn’t feel all that different from the prose, and it made it hard to connect with characters other than Ash. It made it more difficult to connect to the romance than it should have been.
In some ways, this book felt a lot like reading one of Robin Mckinley’s fairy tales. It has an air of mystery to it that draws the reader in and acts as a veil between the reader and everything that happens. It’s a feel to the book that adds more to the world than anything else. The clunkiness of the dialogue actually became something like an asset in this, because it added to the veil and made me as a reader feel like I was somewhere very different from here. It’s pleasant escapism.
It’s a sort of escape that tells a lot about our world though. Lo gives us a world where women who like other women aren’t just accepted and normal, but one in which there are myths and stories, fairy tales even, that get told about them and their loves, and their exploits, and their daring deeds. It’s a world where most people are straight, but it’s not even commented on when someone isn’t. There were holes in this, a heteronormativity that kept women marrying for money and fairy tale type gender norms, but it was a welcome, healthy relief for me, and probably is for other queer women and girls to just enter a world for a while where we can breathe.
It offers escape in another way. It offers escape from so much of popular culture where even if a girl’s lucky enough to have the lead, she’s the only one with an important part. All the other characters who mean something are boys. All her friends and sidekicks, and most of her enemies are boys, and if there are other girls around, they’re just not that important. Ash has girls everywhere. For once it’s the boys who are forgettable and unimportant, and you know what? I didn’t even notice it until I was finished.
In the end, I really didn’t care about the romantic elements, because I was too busy engaging with the vivid descriptive passages. I enjoyed myself thoroughly, I fell in love with Ash, and I wanted to explore the world some more. That actually says kind of a lot about a book that didn’t press any of my usual buttons. There are no real politics, as Ash isn’t in a position to be exposed to any, there’s no particularly interesting anthropology, and there are no battle scenes. Still I enjoyed it. Must be the feel, because I loved it.
The one thing I noticed, in a book full of lesbian women, there weren’t any gay men. Of course, this can be forgiven, as there were almost no men at all. It’s definitely not a book to give to a young man, gay or straight. Young girls on the other hand... *grin* Well I enjoyed it, anyway.
