Author: Malinda Lo
I really wanted to love this book. I didn't.
I love the idea of this book. I adore fairytale retellings (and, okay, I'm a bit of a sucker for the Cinderella story), and this one put a really cool twist on it -- Ash (the Cinderella character), rather than falling in love with the prince, falls for the king's huntress, aided not by a fairy godmother but by a fairy (think faerie) who's in love with her. It was such a cool story and I absolutely adored Malinda Lo's twist on this classic tale.
What I didn't love was the writing style. It read, to me, like an antiquated fairy tale -- which fits for the kind of story this is, I guess, but it feels very forced and one-dimensional as a narrative style for an entire novel. I had no emotional connection to Ash or her relationships with Sidhean or Kaisa. Ash at one point describes fairy tales as stories with a lesson to be learned; I kind of felt this way about the novel ASH. It's less of a novel that you get emotionally invested in and more one that's like oh, okay, Cinderella but she loves a girl and also love is important. You don't feel the love, you just sort of read about it.
I don't know. I did enjoy ASH because as I said, such a cool twist on the story, but I kind of had to drag myself through the style and I don't feel attached to the characters at all. But as this is Malinda Lo's first novel, I love her blog, and her newer books aren't fairytales, I'll definitely try something else of hers.
