Ash by Malinda Lo

In this book there is a girl named Aislinn who is referred to as ash. In the beginning of the story it explains how her mother died, though ash was grief ridden she had the shoulders of her father to lean on, and his arms to run into when she cried- but then her father died as well. Previous to the death her father had remarried to a cruel woman with two daughters, so when he passed on ash was left with these sad remains of a “family”, and was eventually forced to move from her home she had lived in since birth and adapt to the royal city life. In past books and from real life experiences I often saw that when people went through traumatizing events or lost something that they loved and that was very important to them, they took another look at their life- at the people around them and at the world itself, this loss led them to reassess themselves and change for better. But in this story Ash does not do a 360 and look again at the aspects of her life, she turns to fairytales, stories, and legends that she can follow aimlessly and forget the pain. I believe that all the hurt that ash has been through only made her flee to a dream state, and not brought her to terms with reality.

One example of this is when she meets the fairy Sidhean. All her life by her mom, her caretaker, and the entire town, she had been told to never trust a fairy- to never sip from their cup- to never follow the fairy hunters or step into the fairy ring. But all of a sudden she stumbles upon Sidhean and instead of turning away and running she goes closer- and began looking for him every night, going as far as to wander the forest alone on cold nights in unfamiliar places searching for the danger she had always been told to run from. I think ash does this because since she has lost so much of the reality around her she must feel like she is gripping with her fingernails onto the last bit she knows is still there: herself. She looks for danger because she wants to be hurt, she wants to feel an emotion again, to feel movement within her so that she knows she is not just a simple presence but a being that lives and breathes. I think she cannot feel as strongly as before because all the pain swallowed her long ago, she drowned in the hurt until she couldn’t tell the difference between this pain and all the feelings she once had, so she is searching for reassurance.

Another example of this is how she searches desperately for love in everyone. Even though her step mother treats her no better than any other servant or maid, ash still insists on doing everything she can to please both her mother and her sisters. Also when she meets the huntress she becomes almost immediately possessive and desperate for the huntress to show affection love and care back to her- this desperation also appears in her a Sidhean it is another reason she went chasing after him, in search of someone to show an interest in her no matter what kind.

This connects to the world because it shows how while a lot of people will face the pain head on and embrace it and slowly work through it, others will live in a world of shadows hiding In the corners of denial and refusing to come out from their shelter and face the storm. They will wander around in search of something that they feel they have lost, when really the emptiness they feel is really the cut in their heart that they never gave a chance to heal- that they just ignored and left gaping open. This kind of thing I believe will lead people to do irrational things. An example of this is 9/11 when so many people lost their loved ones and had to see the scene repeated on news broadcasts and in pictures scattered around the world;  some chose not to accept this loss and slowly start to get better but to turn around and blame others, to distract their minds  from all the pain. It was incidents like this that made discrimination against Muslims so prominent. It is not anyone’s fault that these things happen; it’s just the fragile state of the human mind that is often overestimated in its strength.