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A review by rebeccazh
Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
finished this in one afternoon. i really enjoyed this! it's quite different from the first book (what i remember of it anyway) but this book was very atmospheric and captured the feeling of a fairytale well.
i didn't really like the number of characters narrating. i'm really not a fan of ensemble casts. this book starts out with a single first person narrator and it then branches out into five(?) first-person perspectives. further confusing things is the fact that the narrators of each new scene aren't labelled so i had to guess. i really liked one of later additions to the cast though. the tsar's chapters were very entertaining. also, nearly all the female characters were women or girls who had little power or choice over their lives and they had fathers, husbands or lords who made choices for them, who then began to work together.
i liked the motif of giving/receiving (for free or for a price) and i wish we could've seen how love works in the staryk kingdom (which i found very interesting because it's a society based totally on transactions and i wish it was explored in more detail). also, i wish the whole book was focused on miryem because her chapters were the most compelling. i skimmed a lot of the other subplots.
there was also a motif about coldness of heart / being calculating vs. being overly indulgent / soft-hearted. being able to shut off one's heart is associated with personal power, such as being able to stand up for oneself and protect one's best interests, and being soft-hearted was portrayed as a weakness as it allowed others to take advantage of oneself (i thought at first that miryem's arc would be about balancing these two opposing viewpoints but it wasn't), and i kind of wish that had been explored as well.
overall, i really like novik's fairytale series and hope she does more stuff like this
i didn't really like the number of characters narrating. i'm really not a fan of ensemble casts. this book starts out with a single first person narrator and it then branches out into five(?) first-person perspectives. further confusing things is the fact that the narrators of each new scene aren't labelled so i had to guess. i really liked one of later additions to the cast though. the tsar's chapters were very entertaining. also, nearly all the female characters were women or girls who had little power or choice over their lives and they had fathers, husbands or lords who made choices for them, who then began to work together.
i liked the motif of giving/receiving (for free or for a price) and i wish we could've seen how love works in the staryk kingdom (which i found very interesting because it's a society based totally on transactions and i wish it was explored in more detail). also, i wish the whole book was focused on miryem because her chapters were the most compelling. i skimmed a lot of the other subplots.
there was also a motif about coldness of heart / being calculating vs. being overly indulgent / soft-hearted. being able to shut off one's heart is associated with personal power, such as being able to stand up for oneself and protect one's best interests, and being soft-hearted was portrayed as a weakness as it allowed others to take advantage of oneself (i thought at first that miryem's arc would be about balancing these two opposing viewpoints but it wasn't), and i kind of wish that had been explored as well.
overall, i really like novik's fairytale series and hope she does more stuff like this