It happens all the time that popular series with a wide set of characters, and incredible unique worldbuilding get companion novels with short stories. What Bardugo did with this one though is something you can‘t compare to other novellas. As much as this also serves the understanding of Grisha Verse world, this book gives an insight into a world, no simple short stories of individual characters and their background can give.

As someone who has loved fairytales from childhood, I have loved to analyze them further than just for what they are: tellings. Each culture, each land brings its very own tales and stories that can be linked to the very essence and history of them. Starting from the various mythologies we know and have learnt about in school, to the very fairytales we got read to as children.

What Bardugo did with this one is giving us a look on how the people and tales work in Ravka, Kerch, Fjerda and Zemeni. Each of them is unique and wraps us in the atmosphere needed to understand these four lands of the Grisha Verse. It gives more than just single stories. It tells stories of whole nations.

Bardugo‘s writing in this one is especially everything but ordinary. Having the tone of fairytales, the stories are read like the ones we know from our childhood days. In fact, you could almost believe in them, as much as you believed in Red Riding Hood, Hänsel and Gretel, The Snow Queen or the Little Mermaid.

While it was hard to get into the story because of that very peculiar tone in writing and a different set of atmosphere with each telling, each of them had come to an point where you had to know the end. The dark and twisted way of how these tales worked and were told brought you closer to the Grisha Verse world, asking yourself more questions than before, while having some answered.

What was also very exciting was the turn Bardugo took on well-known tales of our world. The Grisha Verse itself includes so many elements of our world, twisted and turned to a point of darkness only for us to meet a completely different world before ourselves. So it was probably the best to take things we know and turn them darker, and bloodier to create the atmosphere we needed.
I do have to do some further research on other stories, but I know for sure that we got a Nutcracker retelling, and the Witch Of Duva very much reminded me of Hansel and Gretel, while the last one could be a very own take of The Little Mermaid - or better her counterpart Ursula (in the disney version!).

To take stories we know and twist them to something wholly new does two things: connect us with the world of the Grisha verse and let us understand the culture, and emphazises the cultural elements she took from our world to recreate a different, new world in the Grisha Verse. And that is so so admiring!

For the individual stories:

Ayama and the Thorn Wood - 4 stars
The Too-Clever Fox - 4.5 stars
The Witch Of Duva - 4.5 stars
Little Knife - 3.5 stars
The Soldier Prince - 3.5 stars
When Water Sang Fire - 5 stars