Spinning Silver

Me ha flipado cómo la autora ha combinado folklore y fantasía. La historia tiene buenos giros y la forma de ir rotando entre las diferentes protagonistas y otros personajes, contando la historia siempre en primera persona; le ha quedado muy bien.

Creo que leeré algo más de Naomi Novik en el futuro.

In medieval Russia, three young women, a Jew, a peasant & a noble, harden their hearts and rely on their wits to save themselves & the ones they love. Made much more difficult by the fairy king of winter and a firey demon.

Found my new favourite book. What a delight. Amazing character work and worldbuilding. Beautifully written. Just the right amount of will-they-wont-they, even though that’s not the main point of the story. I listened to the audiobook on Audible and the narrator is also FANTASTIC. She really did give each character a different voice. Im absolutely in love with this story.

зненацька — захоплива казка для підлітків і допослих!

As the pandemic hit, exhausted and strung out on adrenaline, I completely lost my ability to concentrate on books. And yet, Spinning Silver reached me with its deeply evocative setting, weaving together multiple American and Russian faerie tales with a modern sensibility to how to write strong female characters. This is also possibly the first high fantasy novel I've ever read to include Jewish characters.

I loved Miryem, Irina and Wanda, each strong in their own way, each determined to make her own way to bettering her life and that of her family. I liked the Staryk, with their icy alienness, yet truly a sympathetic villain. I liked the foil between the fire demon and the Staryk. Overall, it hit the sweet spot of combining a haunting setting, strong characters and a compelling plot.

Loved both the story/stories and their telling. That was superb.

An absolute joy of a book. It takes the form of a lot of fantasy and/or fairy tale cliches but repeatedly twists them into much more interesting things, and takes on some pretty grim thematic content without being a grim read overall. I loved how bluntly it dealt with antisemitism and the purposes that prejudice serves, and the repeated thread through the whole book of people who looked greedy or outright evil from the inside looking reasonable and/or desperate once the author lets us see the character's own perspective.

That said, I hated Miryem's ending. It felt like a very jarring return to fairy tale cliches, and I'm basically pretending that the last 2-3 pages of a book that I otherwise adored simply don't exist.

I normally love retellings of fairytales. This one was just disappointing. I loved what was happening at first. Then it just got kinda boring?

No spoilers, but. This was a disappointing book. I was so excited at first but was disappointed.

And the ending made me craaaaazy. Just, girl... fuckkkkkkk

This book is so freaking good. The basic premise is a reimagining of the classic tale of Rumplestiltzkin. Only, instead of an imp, a young girl "makes gold" through trade. A faerie king hears the boasts of creating gold, and challenges her to change his silver into gold.

Novik's story straddles about six different point of view characters, though you are usually given some reason to care about or at least recognize each before they speak for themselves. It is a story of survival through smart bargaining, of love of family and of country, and of the choice of what we become.

It is a fantastic book. I cannot recommend it enough.

Come for the AO3 connection, stay for the
- rich Jewish–Slavic speculative fiction (too rare!),
- superb Freakonomics-grade real-world economics and finance (that is, better than the garbage they teach you in micro and macroeconomics; that scene where she can offer a better price for better wool than the local carters who don’t differentiate enough, a lesson for thoughtful futures traders),
- frightening prediction of the future, where women are invisible, outsiders are downtrodden, and men make the rules, that many authoritarian nationalists seem to crave.

This was an interesting read. It follows in the footsteps of Uprooted, where Novik started to re-examine Eastern European fairytales. I found Uprooted quite entertaining, so Spinning Silver was an easy sell. In this book the author goes even deeper into the lives of ordinary people in an extraordinary world. We start by following Miryem, the daughter of Jews living in some small village in some Eastern European-ish country. Their world is very familiar, except for the presence of supernatural creatures, the Staryk. Throughout the book we see many first person perspectives, besides Miryem's. The idea was, I guess, to show how people in fairytales might experience the events of their story. When the storyteller talks about "the moneylender's daughter" we don't get her backstory, her thoughts, her actions. In this book we do and I liked that.

A Jewish money-lender's daughter takes on her father's debtors, nearly triggering disaster. Winter kings, Demon possessed Tsars, mathematics as magic...so many wonderful things here.
I loved this book. I thought it was just as evocative as "Uprooted", but it hung together much better. Naomi Novik has a knack for weaving in fairy tale elements in fresh and surprising ways. And the way she mixed in real historical details, like the way the Jewish characters are treated by their neighbours, make the story feel all the more real and grounded. The three heroines are all believable - strong and brave in different ways. This is a book that I could definitely re-read many times.

I don't know if you've noticed, but I like fairy tales. Good ones, with "hard" fairies.

It doesn't hurt that the "reiz, sen senos laikos"The typical beginning for a fairy tale in Latvian; once, a long, long time ago. is convincing. It also helped to distance me from the domestic abuse that was in the book, letting me hope that things might not be as bad nowadays.

I found it a bit weird listening to names pronounced in English that I would pronounce differently, but nice to have a fairy tale set somewhere more unusual.

It had also been a while since I last heard a book with several points of view as the mode of telling the story, and I love getting into peoples heads like that.

Very, very much a treat for me, this book was.