Ash

Ash is a young adult fantasy novel by Malinda Lo, first published in 2009. It reworks Cinderella and makes the title character a lesbian teenager, keeping the shape of the familiar story: a father who remarries, a stepmother with two daughters, and a girl who ends up as a servant in her own home.

Ash's mother had once been apprenticed to the local Greenwitch, and after her father brings home his new wife he falls gravely ill. His wife takes him to the city to be treated by the Philosophers, who bleed him, and he dies, which is what the Greenwitch had warned would happen. The stepmother then finds the estate deeply in debt and sells the house.

Her consolation is the fairy tales she reads by firelight and her hope that the fairies will carry her off, and that hope brings her Sidhean, a dark and dangerous fairy who claims her for himself. The story turns when Ash meets the King's Huntress Kaisa, learns to hunt at her side, and has to choose between the fairy tale she has been waiting for and the life she has started to want.