Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

#27: Drew Hayden Taylor, The Night Wanderer

Tiffany Hunter has a lot of typical teenager problems: her dad hates her white boyfriend and thinks Tiffany should study more, her boyfriend's friends seem uncomfortable with her because she's Native, and her mom took off with another guy. She longs to be older and to be able to leave boring Otter Lake Reserve for the exciting outside world. And now just to make things more complicated, her dad has taken in a boarder, a mysterious European named Pierre L'Errant who doesn't eat with them and only goes out at night.

I thought this was a really neat and original take on vampires. (This isn't a spoiler because it's quite clear to the reader from the outset what Pierre really is.) Instead of being sexy and beguiling, Pierre is old and knowledgeable, ready to come back to his ancestral home after wandering Europe for centuries. Taylor shows bits and pieces of the Ojibwa culture of Pierre's youth, along with the culture clashes of today, between Tiffany and her family and her boyfriend. I thought the teenage voice faltered occasionally in Tiffany's parts of the narrative, but not enough to throw me out of the book. And I really liked the ending, which is full of tension yet not at all a showdown between vampire and human.

#28: Malinda Lo, Ash

Ash's mother died when she was young, and Ash has never accepted her death, even after her father remarries a woman with two daughters of her own. After Ash's father dies as well, her stepmother forces her to become a servant in order to save money to pay off her father's debts. Her only solace comes from visiting her mother's grave and from brief encounters with the faerie world, where the mysterious Sidhean is both protector and threat. When Ash meets Kaisa, the King's Huntress, she is strongly drawn to her and must escape her servitude in order to meet with her. But the help she needs from Sidhean comes with a price that might separate Ash from Kaisa forever.

Lo starts out with an excellent conceptual twist on the Cinderella story, with a female love interest and a Faerie godfather, but the execution doesn't quite live up to the concept. I felt that I got to know Ash herself reasonably well, but none of the other characters were very well fleshed out. I would particularly like to have seen more of Kaisa, Sidhean, and Clara (Ash's younger stepsister). Similarly, the plot was set up fairly well, but the happy ending was too easily achieved. Still, I thought the writing was very good, sensual and descriptive, and the flaws in execution were very much first-novel flaws. I'll be very interested to see what Lo writes next.