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A review by brennanaphone
The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
4.0
Kind of strange! I absolutely adored the first 3/4 of the book: it was eerie, insidious, captivating, and atmospheric. The absolute cold and ancient feeling of a 14th-century Russian setting made it feel at once very hard and real and yet also terribly fey. I thought it was going to be the story of a magical girl who is curtailed at every step by oppressive gender expectations and who fails to live up to the destiny she was meant to have, which would have been really interesting.
The last fifty pages of the book created a strange tonal shift, and the writing style kind of changed to a more contemporary feel. There were suddenly elements of YA romance-novel-style stuff I wasn't expecting. It almost felt like she wrote the last fifty pages first, then wrote the rest of the book leading up to it, but that she also became a better writer as she wrote. Still a lovely and entrancing book--reminded me a lot of Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver.
The last fifty pages of the book created a strange tonal shift, and the writing style kind of changed to a more contemporary feel. There were suddenly elements of YA romance-novel-style stuff I wasn't expecting. It almost felt like she wrote the last fifty pages first, then wrote the rest of the book leading up to it, but that she also became a better writer as she wrote. Still a lovely and entrancing book--reminded me a lot of Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver.