|
If you haven’t read Huntress, I won’t spoil it for you, but here’s the basic gist: Two girls are called on a quest to save their Kingdom, which entails journeying through a haunted Wood to the land of the Fairy Queen. This sounds like your typical hero’s quest, but I changed it by setting it in a world inspired by Chinese and Japanese cultures, and by creating a magic system and worldview that was essentially Taoism made real. In addition to the saving-the-world plot, the story is driven by a philosophical question: Is love determined by fate? When I look back on Huntress now, I can see that it was an ambitious story—one that I probably wasn’t quite ready for at the time. But I think it’s a good idea to stretch yourself as a writer, and I definitely learned a lot from writing Huntress. In retrospect, I think Huntress did pretty well for itself. It was a Lambda Literary Award finalist, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and it made several best-of-year lists. It came out at a time when Asian-inspired fantasy in YA was still extremely rare, and many people (and reviewers) didn’t understand it. I got puzzled feedback from some readers who didn’t understand how Huntress was “Asian.” How things have changed in a decade! These days, many more Asian-inspired YA fantasies are published, and they’ve even hit the New York Times bestseller list. And today, the covers of Asian-inspired fantasies often feature Asian characters illustrated by talented artists. This was not the case when the Huntress cover was being designed. Back then, book covers featuring characters of color were rare, and publishers still believed that it could be detrimental to sales. With Huntress, there was never any question that the character on the cover should be Asian, but illustrated covers were not as popular then; most YA covers originated in stock photography. However, there simply wasn’t much stock that featured Asian people of the right age in non-stereotypical ways. During the cover design process, I remember seeing stock imagery of Asian people in karate outfits, or teen Asian girls talking on cell phones. None of those worked for Huntress. Ultimately, my publisher photoshopped the stock image that they chose, which did come from a martial arts collection, because the girl in the photo was too young, and the weapon she was holding was incorrect. I’ll admit that the Huntress cover is not the way I would have depicted Kaede, the main character, but in many ways it was the best they could do at the time. And when it was released, a lot of readers really connected with this image. I often felt a little weird about it because I didn’t see Kaede in this cover image, but so many others did. It just goes to show that the author’s perception of their story doesn’t necessarily align with the way readers read it. I once did find an image that depicted a girl who looked like Kaede to me. It’s the cover of Farseed by Pamela Sargent (2007); the art is by Dan Dos Santos.
|
