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This will eventually be a review of Malinda Lo's novel Ash, which I enjoyed very much. First, however, I'm going to talk about a bunch of other stuff, which may at first seem entirely unrelated. And then I'm going to talk about Ash in a way that may seem to imply that I didn't like it. So I want to be clear from the start that this is a review of Ash and that I did like it. Just so we're clear.

I want to start by talking about historic mysteries. I love historic mysteries. I also remember when there weren't that many being published. I remember hanging on every new release from Ellis Peters even when the mysteries themselves weren't very mysterious because she seemed to be the only person writing them. Then, gradually, there seem to be a slow explosion of historic mysteries -- especially medieval ones. And gradually I was able to give myself permission to dislike some of them. Ian Morson's Falconer series never hooked me. Paul Harding always struck me as simply not really liking his subject very much. Miriam Grace Monfredo's Glynnis Tryon started out delightfully but eventually became ... trying. Alys Clare's Hawkenlye series had me throwing the books across the room in short order for crimes against medieval history. Anne Perry's clever plots and good writing kept me hanging on long past the point when her characters become tedious and repetitive. And Peter Tremayne's Sister Fidelma, well what can one say? Let's just say that the dearth of good writing set in early medieval Celtic lands makes one willing to put up with a great deal of dreck.
But I permitted myself to dislike these authors because there were so many more excellent ones: Stephanie Barron, P.F. Chisholm, Lindsey Davis, Margaret Frazer, Lauren Haney, Edward Marston, Sharan Newman, Candace Robb, Caroline Roe, Steven Sayler, Kate Sedley, Leonard Tourney. And those are just the highlights.

Some authors felt they had to make excuses for placing a detective or detective-equivalent in a historic period. They gave their protagonist an occupation that, by some stretching and distortion, might put them in the way of solving crimes. Others took the Miss Marple path and simply had an interesting character who enjoyed solving puzzles. The intrusion of an essentially modern literary genre into a historic era that it didn't quite fit could be jarring or completely invisible depending on the skill of the writer. And I don't enjoy reading medieval mysteries for the pleasure of seeing how a medieval mind would solve puzzles (which, for the most part, the authors didn't try to work out), but rather because the books blend multiple interests in a single experience. I like reading about well-written historic settings, I like solving well-constructed puzzles, and I enjoy interesting and individual characters. I'm willing to forgive a weakness in one of the three legs of the tripod.
And, above all else, I enjoyed reading about characters I can identify with in some way. I like solving puzzles -- I do it for a living. I love stories with historic settings (or SF settings) that are realized in loving and exquisite detail and transport me to another world while making me feel at home in it. I like reading about characters who feel a bit out of sync with their surroundings. All other things being equal, I prefer reading about female main characters to male ones. I like characters with sense and intelligence. And now we get closer to the topic of this review, I love when I get a chance to combine some of my other interests with a lesbian character.

Alas, while there's a booming market in lesbian novels with contemporary settings, there's a much smaller one for historic novels, historic romances, or SF. Now every time I say something like that people start bombarding me with lists of all the novels they can think of with lesbian characters in all those categories -- well novels with gay or lesbian characters anyway, mostly gay. And they think that the fact that they can list off half a dozen novels having those characteristics invalidates my complaint. At this point, I feel like I'm standing in the mall surrounded by a Baskin Robbins, a Dreyer's, a Ben & Jerry's, and a Cold Stone Creamery and I've been handed a dish of Neapolitan artificially flavored ice milk and told that I shouldn't complain because I get three whole flavors. Well, I'm complaining.

So I love it when a book comes along that fits several of my favorite genres and has a lesbian protagonist or at least a prominent same-sex relationship, and it's no big deal. You see, that's the thing: part of that whole Neapolitan ice milk thing is that well over half of the novels people suggest to me are, in essence, coming out novels. And while the coming-out genre has its place, I don't want it in every single dish of ice cream. Me, I came out about 30 years ago and it really hasn't been a big deal in my life since then. I don't identify with it. I can identify with the protagonist who's horribly shy, or who feels out of sync even in the midst of the out of sync, or who spent most of her life without ever finding The One, but I can't really identify with the protagonist who spends an entire book angsting over who and what she is.

So one of the things that really attracted me about the description of Malinda Lo's book Ash is that you've got a standard fantasy setting, a standard fairytale plot, and a main character who just happens to be in love with another woman and it's completely unremarkable. In context, it just is.

Given that, I'm willing to buy the book and give it a read no matter what else goes on. Now this might make you think I have low standards. Not at all. But I have a much lower threshold for giving the book a chance. Given that my books-to-be-read stack is somewhere upwards of 100 volumes, the ordinary threshold is a bit higher.

So, other than pushing many of my buttons, what's this book about? The basic plot is a Cinderella retelling, with a touch of Tam Lin or other fairy abduction theme thrown in. The main character Ash (short for Aisling, but of course, also to tie in with the Cinderella thing), having been traumatized by the deaths of first her mother and then her father, and with the requisite oppressive stepmother, takes refuge by periodically running off to the Magic Wood, and becomes fascinated by a man of the Fair Folk she meets there. She encounters him regularly over the course of several years, and it seems that the fascination runs both ways. But, being a fairy, he's glamorous and hazardous and cold and cruel and fascinating and dangerous. And then, just when she seems bound and determined to continue in this course of self-destruction, someone else comes into her life. She meets, by chance, the King's Huntress (an occupation with some symbolic as well as practical importance, evidently, although the details are pleasantly left to inference rather than being spelled out in an info-dump) and we see the development of a very sweet and natural affection grew between them. Oh yes, and there's a prince. He's not important. There's a ball. There's a midnight deadline. There's a magical ball gown. There's a flight at the stroke of midnight. There's a debt to be paid to Faerie and an important decision to be made. And in the end... well, I did say I enjoyed the book didn't I?

Now there are a few things that about this book that made me roll my eyes. The details of the material culture and the setting are delightfully well realized, but there's very much a generic fantasy feel to the socio-political setting. The personal and place names... well, I suspect the author may own a copy of Celtic Baby Names and there didn't seem to be a lot of rhyme or reason to the mix of cultures other than Default Fantasy Standard. And the most eye-rolling bit is the major plot element of conflict between the older, traditional, woman-centered Earth Magic (with its belief in the slowly-vanishing fairies) and the new, incoming, foreign, male-represented Christianity-equivalent (that considers the fairies mere superstition). I suppose it's a convenient shorthand, but it's a bit of a tired trope by now. Another really minor picky bit is the occasional use of language that jars with the characters using it. Now the book is marketed as Young Adult, so I made certain stylistic allowances for that context, but occasionally we got a vocabulary word that was just about two registers higher than it ought to be for the setting. One or two clinkers I wouldn't notice, but there was a solid sprinkling throughout the story.

But one thing the book did absolutely right is in making the genders of the various relationships irrelevant. Okay, you could say it wasn't irrelevant, because if it hadn't been for the same-sex romance I wouldn't have bought the book. So rather than irrelevant, let's say invisible or more to the point, unmarked. And this is the point where I made the mistake of reading other people's discussions of the book before reading the book itself. There was an author interview and discussion about the book on John Scalzi's blog Whatever and this was the cause of my previous, somewhat cryptic, post. You had people posting about how improbable same-sex romances were in a medieval setting. Um, folks, this is a fantasy story. Things are different there. They can be different just because the author says so. Yes, there needs to be internal consistency, and it needs to be well-written, like everything else, but don't swallow fairies and choke at lesbians. Another commenter posted something along the lines of the character not being a real lesbian because she wasn't oppressed by society. That is, being a woman in love with a woman doesn't matter, the important thing is whether society persecutes you for it. Whatever.

The other item I read before finishing the book (which was probably a minor mistake, but not a major one) was a review pointed to by

houseboatonstyx by someone I don't know, so please be polite if you drop by over there which faulted both Ash and her human lover for passivity in the resolution. (I think the reviewer may have been looking for a stronger Tam Lin analog in the denoument.) But here I think the difference is in genre expectations. Reading this as a Young Adult book, I was comfortable with a great deal of the action being internal to the main character's thoughts and feelings. I see the theme of the story being her rescue of herself from the false promise of fairyland, to choose a human relationship with an equal. The faerie lover struck me as being on a par with the current fad for vampire boyfriends, someone not only very much Other but inherently older, more powerful, and very very dangerous. And yet, in comparison to the perils of working out a give-and-take relationship with another human being, Ash finds her fairy suitor the less frightening option, as well as serving as a safe refuge from all the other hardships of the human world. But in the end, she chooses the harder road of human love and finds a way to both pay her debt to Faerie and to return to the world. No, her girlfriend doesn't come rescue her -- that would have been the easy out. She rescues herself. But since she needs to rescue herself from herself the struggle is internal rather than external, and therefore is easily mistaken for passivity.

All in all, it's a bit fluffy, which comes in part of being aimed at a young adult market. And I think that the author is still settling into her true voice, hence the occasional awkwardness. But it's a book that feeds a part of my soul that starves most of the time and I will continue buying books from this author as long as I keep getting fed.