sanae reviewed Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
"A fresh and imaginative retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin fairytale from the bestselling author of Uprooted, …
Spinning Silver
3 stars
Content warning very minor spoilers, trying to keep them vague
3 stars: enjoyed this book, you might like it too
I liked the kind of fairy tale aspect to it - there's magic but not too much, a lot of the drama is very local and personal, focused on relationships between people. Most of the fantasy elements are familiar, but also enough of a new spin on things to be interesting.
The story is a bunch of people writing in first person with no labels as to who is who; you can generally tell immediately who is who, it feels a bit gimmicky though. Some of the characters are just a lot more interesting than others, and I often found myself impatient to switch back to a more interesting character. Some characters seem kind of redundant with each other and I started to confuse certain pairs near the end, some characters' perspectives seemed included mostly because it was needed for plot reasons, and I noticed that in more action-filled scenes it was usually the perspective of an outside observer to the scene that was narrating which I'm not sure always worked. I think it would have been better if one particular characters' perspective was not shown and you discovered his view of things more gradually over time.
There was also a thing that happened between the main character and another protagonist that seemed kind of morally dubious but the story seemed contrived so that it was ok for her to do that thing. Like most of the protagonists are anti-heroes to some extent but this felt kind of out of place.
Interestingly for a story revolving so much around certain marriages, it was distinctly un-romantic in a way I kind of liked. I feel like fantasy novels with female protagonists - especially ones who are more or less within medieval gender norms - tend to be very romance focused and this was much more about politics and intrigue.
I think I generally liked the first half of the book more when the story was smaller and more personal in scope and less about kingdoms and so on.
It didn't really have much to do with Rumpelstiltskin.
