Spinning Silver – Naomi Novik

Source: Goodreads

Miryem comes from moneylenders on both sides of her family, but while her grandfather has made a name for himself in a walled city, her own father has trouble even approaching his clients in their small town. When Miryem tires of living in squalor while the warm and well-fed townsfolk spin wicked stories about her family and others like her, she takes it upon herself to reclaim her mother’s lended dowry. In doing so, she sets off a chain reaction that leads to dark consequences with the Staryk, who haunt the forests and have raided the surrounding towns for gold each winter for as long as anyone can remember.

A story of faeries and witches and demons who try to push the seasons around for their own gain, Spinning Silver is a masterpiece of interwoven storylines. Heroes all, Miryem, Wanda, and Irina must band together to bring nature back into balance and return peace to their families and their kingdom.

This book was fabulous. Novik’s writing astounds me every time I crack open a book. It haunts me well after I’ve closed it, and sticks its nose into whatever projects of my own I’m working on, saying “Ohhh, but can we make this more complicated and awesome?!” Which is wonderful, but also frustrating when I’m just outlining.

This was the second book I’ve read by Novik, the first being Uprooted, which simply took my breath away. I think this one was slightly harder to follow, just because it took me a few sentences into each chapter to figure out whose POV we were supposed to be in, because, hey, there are many, and three of them are girls who are all roughly the same age and think in similar ways. Nevertheless, I very much appreciated the different personalities and the subtleties in which they were different, and it was most interesting, to me at least, to see three similar people react to things in totally different ways.

I can’t say much about the storylines themselves because SpOiLeRs, but the scenery was beautiful: Winter in Russia, similar to the Winternight trilogy by Katherine Arden vibes (Catch my review of the first novel in that series here!), but definitely set a few years later because transit seems to be much easier in this universe than that one. The three heroes from vastly differing backgrounds and yet all facing similar fates really hits home, while also giving you a much broader view of the world than if it had only followed one of them. This is a book I will not be forgetting any time soon.

HHC Rating: 5 Stars.

Other books by this author: Uprooted

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