Xdyj's books

The Orphan's Tales is definitely the best fairytale-style fantasy I've ever read. Set in a colorful fairytale world where monsters are heroes and "heroes" are monsters, where maidens do not want to be judged by their beauty and love life but by courage, skills and wisdom, where protagonists are not fighting merely for the restoration or preservation of monarchy & the established social orders, it is darkly humorous, contains lots and lots of wonderfully written characters, and is always questioning and subverting fairytale/folklore conventions while giving voices to monsters and witches and crones and other character archetypes that are usually marginalized in traditional narrative, thereby reveals & challenges our cultural assumptions on various identities.