Ash

I so enjoyed Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo that I sought out Ash (2009), Lo’s first published novel. A partial gender-swapped sapphic YA re-telling of Cinderella, it won multiple awards, including a Locus and a Lambda.

In Ash’s world, there are those who live in the country, or woods, and follow the ancient ways, believing in faeries and magic, and the town, where the old ways are no longer followed. Ash’s mother tried to teach her the old ways, but she dies when Ash is young, before Ash is able to learn very much.

Ash is grief-stricken, of course, and the story follows the Cinderella pattern, with her father remarrying a woman with two daughters and then shortly later getting sick and dying, leaving Ash to the mercy of her wicked stepmother, who makes her a servant, purportedly because her father left many debts that Ash must now pay off.

The only place Ash feels any peace is in the woods, where she wanders every chance she gets, and sometimes she ends up places she didn’t intend, like her mother’s grave. There, she meets a man, Sidhean (pronounced “sheen”) who helps her find her way back and seems to always be there when she needs help. Turns out he’s a faerie, kind of a cross between her faerie godfather and love interest.

Also in her wanderings, she meets Kaisa, the King’s huntress–the woman chosen by the King to lead the annual hunting activities. They swap faerie tales and sometimes Kaisa just shows up where Ash lives, while her stepmother and sisters are away.

Lo has included the Prince’s hunt for a wife, but it’s really only a minor storyline–Ash seeks Sidhean’s help to transform herself so that she can attend events, such as the Hunt, and the Ball, to see Kaisa.

I did enjoy it; it’s more of a quiet, brooding story, rather than plot-driven, I think primarily because Ash is understandably depressed due to grief. I loved the fact that the Huntress was a woman, respected by all, but with her own vulnerabilities, and that a love story between two women was normalized. I also loved that Sidhean was not quite a faerie godfather–but more of a faerie guardian or alternate love interest, who offered Ash a choice to live with him in his faerie world. So Ash wasn’t just choosing Kaisa, she had to make a choice between Kaisa and Sidhean.

Thankfully, Lo avoided anti-fat bias and really didn’t describe characters’ body types or sizes much, so I can consider it weight-neutral.