A Fairy Tale of Ice and Fire

[bloodygranuaile]

In my attempt to catch up on fiction books I'd been meaning to read for ages, I finally checked out Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver from the library. This is not quite a sequel to her book Uprooted, but it seems to be considered a sort of companion novel, given that they're both fairy tale retellings, and they both feature awesome female leads that get paired with shitty male leads whomst get reformed to being less shitty. Which, frankly, is a thing that sort of annoyed me in Uprooted, although I understand the fantasy. In Spinning Silver it happens twice, with two different shitty male characters, both of whom are kings that the heroine marries several hundred pages before the romance begins. It's a hook, although it's a little odd having it happen twice in one story. At least Wanda gets to just move into a magic fairy house and raise goats.

 

But I probably shouldn't start at the end, should I?

 

Spinning Silver is actually a really solid entry in the genre of fairy-tale-based novels with clever heroines, a genre that has been one of my lifelong faves since I was a wee 'un reading Ella Enchanted and Dealing with Dragons and assorted '90s girlnerd fare. This one is different than the abovementioned titles, partly because it is longer and more complex and generally aimed at a slightly older audience, but also because it's got Jews, instead of everybody being vaguely Catholic-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off, as happens in a lot of books that take place in fictionalized versions of medieval Europe. This one takes place in a country called Lithvas, which I assume is based off Lithuania, although I don't know anything about Lithuania so it read like "Russia but small" to me (which, maybe Lithuania is like Russia but small? I have no idea). Lithvas is being slowly encroached upon by a kingdom of ice fairies called the Staryk, who steal gold and only come out in the winter. The winters are getting harder and longer, because everything is about climate change. 

 

Our first heroine is Miryam, the daughter of a poor moneylender. The moneylender is poor because he is too soft-hearted to be an asshole about collecting on the debts people owe him, because it is impossible to be both a capitalist and a good person and ah fuck here I go again. Capitalism doesn't even exist yet in this damn book, it's clearly deep in the feudal era. Anyway, Miryam gets tired of being virtuously poor and starving because her dad is too nice to do his job, so she goes out and does it instead, and she's good at it, which upsets her mother because her mother doesn't like watching her teenage daughter become a hardhearted miser, which is understandable. Miryam also unintentionally does a good turn by one of her neighbors, Wanda, by bargaining that Wanda will pay off her father's debt by working in Miryam's house for four years, which actually gives Wanda a bit of a reprieve from the domestic violence her father doles out. 

 

The plot really kicks off when Miryam gets good enough at the whole moneylending thing that she brags that she can turn silver into gold, which by the laws of fairy tales summons the Staryk to dump silver on her and demand that she do exactly that. This kicks off our other main plotline, which involves the Staryk silver Miryam has to trade getting turned into magical jewelry that gets gifted to Irina, the less-than-beautiful daughter of a very important Duke, who is some small bit Staryk herself. The magic jewelry allows her father to marry her off to the tsar, who is under the control of a fire demon, and successfully trading the Staryk silver for enough gold gets Miryam unwillingly married off to the Staryk king, and thus we have our two douchebag monarch romantic leads, one of fire and one of ice. It's all very neat. 

 

The plot to beat back the Staryk and defeat the tsar's fire demon is sufficiently complicated to not be too obvious, and wraps up satisfyingly well, making this an excellent distracting quarantine read. There are quite a lot of viewpoint characters--in addition to the three female leads (Miryam, Wanda, and Irina), we get snippets from Tsar Mirnatius, Irina's old nanny Magreta, and Wanda's younger brother Stepon. They are all reasonably well differentiated, although Mirnatius definitely sticks out a bit; he sounds more modern, probably because he is the only character who is an irony-poisoned sarcastic asshole. (He's fun.) I didn't read the whole thing in one day the way I did Uprooted, but that's largely because I was distracted with having a bunch of actual stuff to do; if I thought I could have gotten away with putting my phone down I probably could have easily just ripped through it in six or eight hours.