Title: Spinning Silver
Author: Naomi Novik
Pages: 434
Finished: July 11, 2018
First Sentence: The real story isn't half as pretty as the one you've heard.
Summary: Miryam, a moneylender's daughter, boasts that she can spin silver into gold. Her boast attracts the Staryk King who lusts for the gold. Irina, daughter to a duke, isn't all that pretty, but she catches the eye of the Tsar. The evil Tsar who marries her to drink her soul. Wanda just wants to leave her home and her abusive father. The three women's tales interweave together as they figure out how to save the world from an endless winter during Medieval Russia.
Thoughts: I read an Advanced Reader's Copy, so some of my thoughts may not apply to the finished product.
This is a tale told with six different voices - three of which are more prevalent than the others. In my copy, there's no visual cue as to when the voices change other than a break in the text. It wasn't too difficult to figure out with context clues, but since the entire story is in first person, it was a bit jarring to jump to someone else without any clue that it was happening until I was about a paragraph into it.
The story itself is a loose retelling of Rumplestiltskin taking place in what I believe is Medieval Russia - similar to the Bear and the Nightengale trilogy. I LOVE this setting. I don't know much about ancient Slavic folktales, but I'm a huge fan of their influences in a number of the stories I've been reading.
I also think it's really bold to make the three female characters fairly unlikeable. Of course, I don't know if they're unlikeable because they're meant to be, or if they're unlikeable because we're socialized to believe that women like this are unlikeable. I will admit I almost quit reading because I just didn't find a lot that I liked in any of the main characters. I'm glad they were strong, but I really hate it when strong means angry towards the world.
The story starts out slowly. Even the turning silver into gold isn't quite as interesting as I had hoped it'd be. Once Miryam is taken by the Staryk though, I found myself smitten and I absolutely had to keep going. All in all it's a solid story and I think I'm going to find more of Novik's works.
This is a tale told with six different voices - three of which are more prevalent than the others. In my copy, there's no visual cue as to when the voices change other than a break in the text. It wasn't too difficult to figure out with context clues, but since the entire story is in first person, it was a bit jarring to jump to someone else without any clue that it was happening until I was about a paragraph into it.
The story itself is a loose retelling of Rumplestiltskin taking place in what I believe is Medieval Russia - similar to the Bear and the Nightengale trilogy. I LOVE this setting. I don't know much about ancient Slavic folktales, but I'm a huge fan of their influences in a number of the stories I've been reading.
I also think it's really bold to make the three female characters fairly unlikeable. Of course, I don't know if they're unlikeable because they're meant to be, or if they're unlikeable because we're socialized to believe that women like this are unlikeable. I will admit I almost quit reading because I just didn't find a lot that I liked in any of the main characters. I'm glad they were strong, but I really hate it when strong means angry towards the world.
The story starts out slowly. Even the turning silver into gold isn't quite as interesting as I had hoped it'd be. Once Miryam is taken by the Staryk though, I found myself smitten and I absolutely had to keep going. All in all it's a solid story and I think I'm going to find more of Novik's works.
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