breaking with convention
In college I had a hard time choosing a major. English seemed like the logical choice since I loved literature, but it wasn’t enough. I finally settled on the Humanities, b/c that allowed (required) me to study religion, history, languages, and the arts. I took film courses, tried my hand at drawing, and studied Italian. There were only two or three other black girls at my college, so I don’t think my odd course selections made me stand out in any way (or more than I already did). There was no “typical” way of being black, is what I mean to say. The handful of black guys mostly played football or rugby; I don’t think anyone ever noticed me, introverted and asocial as I was, and that freed me in a way to pursue my various interests. My roommate, Lucy, was a blond-haired, blue-eyed sorority girl of German descent; despite our many differences, we bonded early on over our shared family drama–divorced parents, wacko stepmothers, older sisters who stole the spotlight. When Lucy went to NYC with her sorors, she brought me a print of a medieval tapestry that hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For my birthday, she gave me a small book about fairies. She loved Renaissance art, I loved medieval history. No one expected a blond sorority girl to subscribe to Architectural Digest and I suppose no one expected me to be fascinated by The Lord of the Rings. I don’t know why I stopped reading fantasy; I guess I wanted to keep my two lives separate. By the end of college, Lucy and I were barely speaking. I had discovered postcolonial literature, Mary J. Blige, and Toni Morrison. I wrote long op-eds for the school paper about the misguided aims of Martin Luther King’s dream. I moved to NYC and bought two bookcases—I had my “pre-conversion” books (Tolkien, Austen, Bronte, Dickens, etc.) and my “post-conversion” books, which were written by black authors. Now I only have one bookcase, and for the most part, my books are no longer segregated. All this is to say that I still have a fondness for fairy 
tales, though I no longer read them the way I did when I was fourteen. Ordinarily, a re-telling of the Cinderella story would not appeal to me. But when Ari raved about Ash (read her review here; read Susan’s review here), and I learned the author was a woman of color (Chinese American Malindo Lo), I decided to give it a try. I don’t write sci-fi or fantasy, and have often felt my imagination wouldn’t be up to the task of creating new worlds populated by alien beings. But if I did decide to rewrite a fairy tale, there are a lot of things I would change. Malindo Lo has done something remarkable by giving her Cinderella figure, Aisling, the chance to reject both a powerful male fairy and the human king’s wealthy son. She opts instead for the King’s Huntress, Kaisa, who holds a special place in court and is widely admired for her skill at tracking and slaying stags. That’s a pretty radical move, and I especially liked how Aisling’s attraction to the fairy king, Sidhean, was more the power of an enchantment than her own free will. Aisling is lonely and intrigued by the mysterious fairies she reads about in books, but when she’s actually close to Sidhean, his magical powers overwhelm her—he summons and dismisses her, and rarely offers any real comfort or tenderness. I like the real-life implications of that idea—that women somehow succumb to a feeling about men that isn’t entirely genuine when not rooted in equality. Sidhean is ageless, of course, but it was also kind of creepy that he knew Aisling’s mother, Elinor, when she was a girl, and then waited several years for Aisling to be old enough to “claim.” Turns out Elinor was strong enough to resist Sidhean’s seduction, and instead cursed him to fall in love with a human girl (not knowing that would be her own daughter). Unfortunately, we don’t learn any of this until the very end of the book. Pacing was an issue for me, though the writing is so lovely you might forget that nothing has actually happened. All the passion and daring is reserved for the fairy tales Aisling reads and recounts to others; between characters in the book there is a curious reserve, perhaps meant to be reminiscent of the restraint demanded by medieval courtly traditions? My main disappointment, however, was that the characters were clearly white (in my mind, at least). Since the author is of color, I wrongly assumed her characters would be as well, but aside from the bisexual triangle, nothing else about this fairy tale breaks with convention. I have low tolerance now for “eyes blue as sapphire,” slender white throats that flush pink with excitement, or long blond braids snaking down a heroine’s back. If Kaisa was this important, strong, skillful woman, let her DO something with those skills! More than once we hear a fairy tale about a huntress who defies the fairies in the name of love—yet Kaisa never gets this chance. Even Aisling is a bit too timid for my tastes—she runs away once, but returns to her servant’s life in her stepmother’s home; aside from one or two impertinent remarks that earn her a slap across the face, the girl hardly does anything to shape her own destiny (until the very end, and even that occurs without a test or struggle). Sidhean is invested with too much automatic power—he never tries to tempt Aisling by showing her the (illusory) wonders of his world….basically, this book lacked excitement, which is what I expect from the fantasy genre. The writing is beautiful, and there are lovely descriptions of nature and the silks and jewels worn by the women to various balls and masquerades. There’s a lot of longing, but there isn’t a lot of passion or drama, and I would like to have seen viable examples of same-sex couples in Aisling’s world—was it forbidden? or just the stuff of lore–a holdover from the Old Days when women (witches) had more power? I feel like I need to reread The Mists of Avalon now…or try some adult fantasy where characters are either “umarked” in terms of race, or explicitly racially diverse. I think my fourteen-year old self would have devoured this book. But I’m a grown-up now…
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