Huntress

Malinda Lo is one of those authors that I found through other authors on social media, where she said all sorts of smart things about diversity and YA and social justice and I was like, this lady sounds cool, maybe her books are cool too! So that is why I bought a copy of Huntress.

Huntress takes place in what is largely a familiar sort of pseudo-medieval fantasy land, but with strong Asian influences. For example, the ruling and most humanoid sort of fairies in the fairy realm are known as the Xi… pronounced "Shee", the same way that the terms for Celtic faeries "Sidhe" or sometimes "Seelie" are pronounced, except it's spelled "Xi", which is exactly how that syllable is typically transliterated from Chinese. I am a language dork and I think this is SUPER COOL.

The premise of the story is that nature has mysteriously gotten all out of balance, with the sun not rising and the crops failing and it being sort of a dreary chilly temperature regardless of what time of year it is, when the human king receives an invitation from the long-unheard-from fairy queen. Hoping the invitation has something to do with the changed climate, the King, in conjunction with the Academy of Sages, which is the awesome all-female (I think) magic school that also seems to have a sort of monastic/nunnery thing going on, kick off a fantasy/adventure quest plot. The questers in this plot include three guards (one of whom is a badass lady guard named Shae), the crown prince Con, and our dual protagonists, Kaede and Taisin. Taisin is the most magically gifted student at the Academy, and she's been having visions of Kaede getting into a rowboat on an icy beach. Kaede is pretty much the least magically gifted student at the Academy; she has instead been spending her time doing gardening and learning knife throwing and basically doing every awesome non-magical thing she can find to do until she becomes badass. The two girls have to figure out how to combine their very different strengths into order to save the world, and also they fall in love. (Con and badass lady guard Shae also fall in love and they are super cute.)

I'm trying not to describe this book using words like "standard" or anything like that because it makes it sound unimaginative, and it's not really. But… in a number of ways, it's one particular type of story: a fantasy-adventure-romance in which teenage intrepid heroes come of age and save the world and fall in love; it's a genre/story outline/thing that is basically my favorite and it works very well and it can be reimagined and retold a million times without getting old, when it's filled up with different characters and different worlds and different threats and plot twists and stuff. And it's a pretty enjoyable, entertaining, solid example of that kind of story, maybe not the most twisty in terms of blindsiding plot twists that I've ever read (I have read some books that totally turn the plot inside out every couple chapters), but it's a very good example of this particular type of story. And this is a type of story that never, ever seems to have gay protagonists. It's more and more common to be able to find gay protagonists these days—but it seems to stay strictly in literary fiction, contemporary realistic sort of stuff, and almost every story with gay protagonists I've ever read has been a story primarily about being gay. This is why I rarely read fiction with gay protagonists, because I really have a low tolerance for reading more than a few books that are primarily about romance or sexuality per year. Fantasy and science fiction, particularly YA SF/F, seems to be getting better at having more secondary characters who are LGBT, even viewpoint characters in books as long as they're fairly ensemble-cast-y stories, but it still seems like there are stories about gay people being gay, and then there are stories about straight people saving the world from magic curses/evil overlords/invading aliens (sometimes with their gay friends in tow). Huntress might be the first book I've ever read that is just straight up about lesbians saving the world from dark magic. And I think that is pretty cool! I would love to see a LOT more books like this, books about saving the world and about solving crimes and about fighting aliens and about discovering long-lost treasure or whatever, where the main romantic subplot isn't het. (For now, though… there are apparently a few other Malinda Lo books I haven't read yet! And there is Welcome to Night Vale.) Anyway, Taisin and Kaede's romance is believable and touching, and even though they don't end up together at the end due to the monastic element of Taisin's chosen career, neither of them dies or becomes evil or any of those terrible tropes.

I do think this book could have used some tighter editing; there were a couple of instances of word conflation ("disinterested" for "uninterested"; "free reign"), and there were several instances of mid-scene POV switches, which I always find jarring even though I've seen it in a number of novels now. I also found the scene where they were attacked by wolves slightly jarring—while I'm aware that "wolves are bad and they attack people because that's just what they do" is a common fantasy tropes, my own particular reading history means that I've read very, very few books that have actually used that trope at is, whereas I've read several books that take more favorable and complex views of wolves. And since this is a book that does a lot to deliberately stay out of other old tropes and takes a much more thoughtful view of a lot of "default" issues in fantasy books—the "Huntress" does a lot of thinking about the moral implications of killing anyone or anything, even for the right reasons; violence is never treated as Awesome Happy Glorious Time even when it's clearly needed—I was much more surprised than I would have been otherwise that the wolf attack thing was just played straight.

Overall, though, I did like it a lot, and I will probably be picking up Malinda Lo's other stuff in the future, and if you like YA adventure fantasy things and are not a bigot douchebag, then I would certainly recommend Huntress. It has Action! Romance! Magic! Fairies! And a bonus unicorn near the end!

Originally posted at: http://bloodygranuaile.livejournal.com/37163.html