Huntress

Huntress by Malinda Lo 

*The formatting of this post got all jacked up somehow. I don't know what happened*

So, I have to do a little speech. I get super annoyed with books that when they give the description of the book on the back, or inside cover, or wherever they're decided to hide it; they reveal plot points past a quarter of the way through the book. If the first quarter of the book is not interesting enough to write a summary on with a VERY VAGUE line of what the book could lead you towards, then what the heck. Learn to summarize better. Or the book isn't that good. URGH.

So this is the summary verbatim on my copy of Huntress. "Nature is out of balance in the human world. The sun hasn't shone in years, and crops are failing. Worse yet, strange and hostile creatures have begun to appear. The people's survival hangs in the balance. To solve the crisis, the oracle stones are cast, and Kaede and Taisin, two seventeen-year-old-girls, are picked to go on a dangerous and unheard-of journey to Tanlili, the city of the Fairy Queen. Taisin is a sage, thrumming with magic, and Kaede is of the earth, without a speck of the otherworldly. And yet the two girls' destinies are drawn together during the mission. As members of their party succumb to the unearthly attacks and fairy tricks, the two come to rely on each other and even begin to fall in love. But the Kingdom needs only one huntress to save it, and what it takes could tear Kaede and Taisin apart forever." Citation: Lo, Malinda. Huntress. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2011. Print. Found on the back of the book as a summary for the book.

.........

So, it sounds like this big wind-up like WHOA adventure. Too bad that is essentially the whole book. Except for the last, oh, fifty pages or so. The whole Huntress thing never really comes into play except when one of the characters does the obligatory, "CRAP, WE HAVE TO GET THE BOOK TITLE IN HERE SOMEHOW" move.

Also, the book had a weird way of doing the, "Well, this is something that seems a little odd and has never come up before, but it's incredibly useful. I'll explain it with one line of text and EVERYONE WILL GO ALONG WITH IT. YES."


Also, this whole line of: "But the Kingdom needs only one huntress to save it, and what it takes could tear Kaede and Taisin apart forever." Citation: Lo, Malinda. Huntress. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2011. Print. Found on the back of the book as a summary for the book.
That line never comes into play. EVER. When the ordeal happens, there's no, "OMG I COULD DIE" I mean, not for real. There's no real emotional attachment to the scene except for Kaede and Taisin loving each other. They do the, "I hope I can return to her" as if they're talking about remembering to pick up milk when they go shopping.


I'm also a bit confused by the cover. There's a girl on the cover and she's holding a wooden sword. Um, to my recollection, no one in the entire book ever holds a WOODEN sword. Now, people use bows & arrows, throwing knives, real swords, etc, but never a wooden sword. So why would the girl depicted on the cover be holding a wooden sword?


I'm really annoyed with how the book ended. They spend about 25/100 (I'm making fractions for happy maths, shhhh) of the book setting up the home country, the life of the academy, blah blah backstories. Alright, that's cool.

They spent about 50/100 of the book's content to make their way through the woods. Stuff happened. It was a bit intense sometimes, but other times I kept asking, "Was this necessary? Or are we shooting for pages?" (For the record, my copy is 371 pages in length.) 

Then about 15/100 is spent just making it into the city, and waiting for an audience with the Fairy Queen. (Also, I feel like that's not a spoiler since the back of the book told you about almost all of the book).

So about 10/100, the last part of the book, is where we come across content that we couldn't find on the back of the book. This part is immediately rushed. It seems like the story was a train up until this point, just chugging along the tracks and taking it's sweet time to reach the destination. Then it suddenly became about as frantic to get through everything as the people who shop for Christmas gifts on Christmas morning! The stuff that could have been really cool, interesting, and spent lots of time dwelling on as it was a foreign concept was just kind of a hiccup to the book. I don't know what the heck the book was rushing around for either. It was just like BAM, WE GOT TO GET THIS DONE. NOW.

I'm also lead to believe that this is a prequel book to Ash. Based on my experience with Huntress, I have no intention of picking up Ash. I would also recommend steering clear of this book. It gets slightly cool as they describe the fay, but that's about it. It was also a LBGTQIA book, but it wasn't any sort of particularly special romance. It was interesting that the culture seemed to almost embrace those with non-hetereosexual preferences, but it definitely wasn't something the book dwelled on.