Huntress Review

This week's novel is Huntress, a YA high fantasy by Malinda Lo.

Summer doesn't come, the sun doesn't come out, the crops fail, people are starving, monsters start appearing, and the country hangs on the edge of civil war.  When the Fairy Queen sends the first invitation to her country that anyone can remember, everyone assumes it must be related to these unnatural problems.  Through visions and magic stones, the sages decide to send two students along with the crown prince.  Taisin is talented, soft spoken, and ready to become a sage after her graduation.  Kaede meanwhile has no talent to speak of and prefers to spend her time weeding in the garden or throwing knives.  When she graduates, her chancellor father has plans to marry her off.  Together they travel to see the Fairy Queen, return the world to its natural order, and fall in love along the way.

Stories that involve long stretches of traveling on horseback for weeks and weeks are not my favorite.  Horses are terrifying.  And slow movement through a slowly changing landscape naturally tends toward slow pacing.  Here it makes the pacing and action weirdly lopsided.  The journey to the capital of the fairy kingdom takes three quarters of the book, leaving the explanation for what's happening with the weather and multiple big action scenes for the last quarter.  These moments of climax and catharsis aren't given time to breathe, or given time for their impact to settle.  Furthermore, the traveling undercuts the Asian influence, which was one of the advertised hooks of the book.  They leave their Asian inspired setting to travel in the same way that happens in every Medieval European inspired fantasy.

The other hook that fell short is the romance.  Yay, lesbian representation!  But they don't grow to love one another.  It's like a switch that's turned off and then turned on.  Most of their basis for why they like each other is that Taisin had a vision that she would love Kaede in the future and Kaede thinks Taisin smells good.  At no point is it mentioned that she probably smells like terrifying horses and stale biscuits and camping, but maybe Kaede's into that.  The sad part is that I really liked all the characters, I just wish they had gotten time to develop, to grow with each other and change with each other.  I wish some of the themes introduced during their episodic stops along their journey had lead to character growth.  There's themes of feeling like a murderer even if self defense was justified, and themes of being tempted by power, and themes of betrayal at being sent out without all the answers.  Really fertile ground.  But mostly these incidents bum the characters out, then they move along.

So this book had a bunch of great seeds of ideas that never sprouted the way I wanted.

***
Next week we get a little caught up with the reading challenge. The Curse Worker series: White Cat, Red Glove, and Black Heart. Fantasy, con-men, and organized crime by Holly Black.