Huntress by Malinda Lo
372 pages
Published 2011
Read from January 20 to January 22
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Lo's main strength as a writer, if I may judge from a grand total of two books, is her ability to generate an unusual amount of goodwill for her characters. The characters themselves are pleasantly bland, unremarkable in every way; I can't seem to discern any technical means Lo uses to manipulate her readers, managing to make me feel like following her leads around. Perhaps she's skilled with the art of the reader proxy, the blank hero with ample open space for the reader to slip herself inside. Certainly there was no other reason I felt like completing this book. The worldbuilding was generic, achieving the rare feat of making the human culture rather more interesting than the dull fairyland where folk drink coffee, eat cheese, and pack "miraculously" cheese-flavored crackers for travel -- Cheez-Its as lembas bread? The central conflict is a cliche. The writing quality sank below what I would expect for a genre romance aimed at young adults -- that is to say, still worlds better than the likes of Twilight, but falling far short of what Lo herself offered in Ash. Without exaggeration, the prose read like something I would have produced as a teen, clunky and mechanical, descriptive without grace or flow.
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