Huntress (Malinda Lo)

Huntress (Malinda Lo)

Author Biography

Malinda Lo has written four LGBTQ-themed novels for young adults and is the former managing editor of AfterEllen.com, the largest entertainment news website for lesbians and bisexual women.

Published By: Little, Brown and Company

Year: 2011

ISBN: 978-0-316-04007

Reading Level: Grades 10 and up

Reader’s Annotation:

When endless winter threatens the Kingdom, Kaede and Taisin are sent to seek help from the Fairy Queen. But will the two girls have the strength to face the journey’s dangers, as well as their own forbidden love for each other?

Plot Summary:

Nature has fallen out of balance. Winter is lingering too long, crops have spoiled, social unrest is brewing, and strange, frightening supernatural creatures have begun to appear everywhere. In hope of finding a solution, the king sends his son Prince Con on a journey to visit the Fairy Queen; and as advised by oracle stones, two seventeen-year-old girl students from the Academy of Sages are sent with him. One student, Taisin, is a lowly farmer’s daughter, but a powerful magician and seer. The other, Kaede, is of noble birth, but more skilled with a dagger and arrows than with magic.

The journey is bleak. Dangers both natural and supernatural continuously threaten the travellers. One by one, the party’s guards fall victim, until Con, Kaede and Taisin are left to fend for themselves. But together Kaede’s fighting skills and Taisin’s magic ensure that they survive, and increasingly, the two girls feel drawn to each other. But their feelings must be resisted. Taisin is destined to be a sage someday... and sages are forbidden to fall in love…

Critical Evaluation:

Set in the same fantasy world as the acclaimed LGBTQ “Cinderella” retelling Ash, but centuries earlier, this book tells the story of how the position of King’s Huntress (held by Ash’s lover Kaisa in the first book) came to be. It’s a distinctly different story than Ash, however. The first book’s Western-style culture and fairy-tale tropes are replaced by an Asian-inspired culture and an energy-based magic system inspired by Taoism, qigong and the I Ching. It’s a much darker story as well, with a dystopic atmosphere of cold and rain, dangers around every corner, and a climax in which, for the land’s greater good, a mother sends the heroes to kill her own daughter – the villainous half-human, half-fairy Elowen, whose scheme to conquer the fairy realm is the cause of the endless winter.

The central romance is a star-crossed one as well. Kaede and Taisin know from the start that eventually their different destinies will part them. Still, the ending is bittersweet, not tragic, as both heroines actively choose their separate paths yet never regret the love they shared. More importantly, their heartbreak has nothing to do with their being lesbians. As in Ash, this fantasy world has no homophobia and no one treats the girls’ love any differently than if one of them were male.

This isn’t a perfect book by any means. The prose is sometimes melodramatic, characterization is fairly flat (though Kaede and Taisin’s backgrounds and skills contrast sharply, their personalities feel slightly interchangeable), and the omniscient narrator’s jumps between different characters’ viewpoints can be disorienting. But with its its psychic sages, ruthless fairies and energy-harnessing magic, its intense action scenes, its eerie dystopic atmosphere, and its beautiful, bittersweet portrait of lesbian romance, Huntress is still a captivating addition to any fantasy lover’s collection.

Curriculum Ties:

•LGBTQ themes

•Fantasy worlds

Challenge Issues:

•Mild profanity

•Violence

•Disturbing imagery

•Filicide

•LGBTQ themes

Why This Book?

LGBTQ readers and straight readers alike will be absorbed and affected by this dark, poignant fantasy.