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Malinda Lo's Ash
Jan. 6th, 2010 09:45 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
pylduck.livejournal.comWhile on my travels to Philadelphia the last week of 2009, I picked up Malinda Lo's Ash at Giovanni's Room, the gay independent bookstore in town.
Lo is a queer Chinese American journalist (a friend informed me she writes regularly for the weblog AfterEllen), and Ash is her first novel. The book is categorized as a young adult (YA) novel. One blurb on the back cover describes it as a revised version of the classic Cinderella fairy tale. The story certainly resonates with that story of the destitute girl living with her cruel stepmother and stepsisters, but some of the key elements of Cinderella are not present in Ash (the glass slipper, most importantly).
What I find fascinating about this retelling is that it clearly is in the vein of much interesting feminist/queer retellings of fairy tales that tend to be quite heteronormative and patriarchal (at least the versions that have come down to us). In this story, we have the young girl Aisling, also called Ash, who quickly loses both her mother and father and faces a world as an orphan, stuck with her pretentious and unkind stepfamily. Aisling's world also teeters at the edge of disenchantment, when the magical aspects of life have receded deep into the woods and faded into the past. Aisling's struggle with growing up in an unloving household is balanced with her contact with the fairy world and with the royal huntress (a woman who officially leads the royal court's hunts).
While this story was a fun read, its complete reliance on the grammar and narrative of European fairy tales was a bit disappointing. I guess I was expecting or hoping for something like Larissa Lai's fiction that blends Chinese mythology with Western narrative references. Lo's story, in fact, was essentially deracinated, devoid of any discussions of racial difference or of characters marked as of a particular race (and hence read as "white"). In terms of its setting, too, I wish it had somehow engaged with a more historically-specific time rather than the nebulous edge-of-modernity moment that fairy tales often reside in (governed by a royal court, surrounded mostly by wilderness, people living in villages....)--here I am reminded of how L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a modern fairy tale, one that began in his contemporary world and then departed for a more magical one but in a way that has led many critics and readers to consider it a parable or allegory of early twentieth century social relations. Nevertheless, I'm interested in what Lo writes in the future, and this book certainly warrants reading for those interested in the fairy tale as a kind of story.
Lo is a queer Chinese American journalist (a friend informed me she writes regularly for the weblog AfterEllen), and Ash is her first novel. The book is categorized as a young adult (YA) novel. One blurb on the back cover describes it as a revised version of the classic Cinderella fairy tale. The story certainly resonates with that story of the destitute girl living with her cruel stepmother and stepsisters, but some of the key elements of Cinderella are not present in Ash (the glass slipper, most importantly).
What I find fascinating about this retelling is that it clearly is in the vein of much interesting feminist/queer retellings of fairy tales that tend to be quite heteronormative and patriarchal (at least the versions that have come down to us). In this story, we have the young girl Aisling, also called Ash, who quickly loses both her mother and father and faces a world as an orphan, stuck with her pretentious and unkind stepfamily. Aisling's world also teeters at the edge of disenchantment, when the magical aspects of life have receded deep into the woods and faded into the past. Aisling's struggle with growing up in an unloving household is balanced with her contact with the fairy world and with the royal huntress (a woman who officially leads the royal court's hunts).
While this story was a fun read, its complete reliance on the grammar and narrative of European fairy tales was a bit disappointing. I guess I was expecting or hoping for something like Larissa Lai's fiction that blends Chinese mythology with Western narrative references. Lo's story, in fact, was essentially deracinated, devoid of any discussions of racial difference or of characters marked as of a particular race (and hence read as "white"). In terms of its setting, too, I wish it had somehow engaged with a more historically-specific time rather than the nebulous edge-of-modernity moment that fairy tales often reside in (governed by a royal court, surrounded mostly by wilderness, people living in villages....)--here I am reminded of how L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a modern fairy tale, one that began in his contemporary world and then departed for a more magical one but in a way that has led many critics and readers to consider it a parable or allegory of early twentieth century social relations. Nevertheless, I'm interested in what Lo writes in the future, and this book certainly warrants reading for those interested in the fairy tale as a kind of story.
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