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lizshayne 's review for:
The Sisters of the Winter Wood
by Rena Rossner
2.5 but rounded down because I'm in a snit.
So this was my horse book. I think it's Judith Tarr who talks about how it feels to read fantasy novels once you've spent time with horses and know them well and anticipate how they act and then horses in novels are like...horse-shaped amalgams of everyone's dream of what a horse ought to be.
This isn't as bad as horses, not by a long shot, but there was a lot in this book that I am more than familiar with and so anything that looked like a mistake was grating. Okay, this is petty so I'm spoiler-ing itLike, the timeline between the Besht and when this story takes place was condensed and that threw me off. The transliteration that was only half yiddishized. The use of the word boyfriend. And so on.
And on the one hand, I really do believe that narratives in general and own voices narratives in particular ought not be gate-kept by other people going "but my tradition is slightly different so this is terrible" because the narcissism of small differences is absurd and also it completely yoinked me out of the narrative every time it happened.
I kind of understood what Rossner was going for with Laya's narrative style, but it evokes Rossetti's original just enough to make me wish she'd actually riffed on the poem instead of just doing odd line breaks. At the end of the day, this book is based in 19th century Jewish life, Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" and, to less of a degree, Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and I am really snippy about all of them.
Lest you think this is entirely a snit (just like 50%), I also HATED the way the swan thing was handled. It was one of those moments where the text speaks out against something (ona'at ger) and then does the thing it speaks out against. The text itself calls into question Adel's conversion and loyalty and crafts a narrative that feels very grounded in blood and legacy, rather than choice and conversion, as markers of fate. Can people really enter into our community, it asks. It would have been so much more powerful if Laya and Liba's inheritances were opposite. The way it is now, it maps religion and selected family onto the non-human and magical and thus immutable lineage of fairy tales. And that's a very uncomfortable way to see Judaism.
Which is why it gets knocked down to a 2. Rossner has an interesting story here and, by the end, I was pretty caught up in it, but I seriously considered putting it down for the first 100 pages because of how bothered I was by it.
So this was my horse book. I think it's Judith Tarr who talks about how it feels to read fantasy novels once you've spent time with horses and know them well and anticipate how they act and then horses in novels are like...horse-shaped amalgams of everyone's dream of what a horse ought to be.
This isn't as bad as horses, not by a long shot, but there was a lot in this book that I am more than familiar with and so anything that looked like a mistake was grating. Okay, this is petty so I'm spoiler-ing it
And on the one hand, I really do believe that narratives in general and own voices narratives in particular ought not be gate-kept by other people going "but my tradition is slightly different so this is terrible" because the narcissism of small differences is absurd and also it completely yoinked me out of the narrative every time it happened.
I kind of understood what Rossner was going for with Laya's narrative style, but it evokes Rossetti's original just enough to make me wish she'd actually riffed on the poem instead of just doing odd line breaks. At the end of the day, this book is based in 19th century Jewish life, Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" and, to less of a degree, Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and I am really snippy about all of them.
Lest you think this is entirely a snit (just like 50%), I also HATED the way the swan thing was handled. It was one of those moments where the text speaks out against something (ona'at ger) and then does the thing it speaks out against. The text itself calls into question Adel's conversion and loyalty and crafts a narrative that feels very grounded in blood and legacy, rather than choice and conversion, as markers of fate. Can people really enter into our community, it asks. It would have been so much more powerful if Laya and Liba's inheritances were opposite. The way it is now, it maps religion and selected family onto the non-human and magical and thus immutable lineage of fairy tales. And that's a very uncomfortable way to see Judaism.
Which is why it gets knocked down to a 2. Rossner has an interesting story here and, by the end, I was pretty caught up in it, but I seriously considered putting it down for the first 100 pages because of how bothered I was by it.