I love this series! I've been getting it from the library, and I have to get my own copies of it now because I know I'll want to read it again in the future. It's fantastic, a mash-up of Russian history and fairy tales. 

I read and reviewed each book separately, so this is basically just for my own records, but I think what I liked best about the series overall was how hard and brutal it could be. That's unusual for me: I generally think, in historical fantasies, that the so-called realism of their crapsack world presentations tends to be unbalanced and highly gendered. As such, I have little patience for it. Here, however, the violence and threats against the characters feel less targeted. They also feel as if they've been presented in a way that emphasises the difficulty of moral choices and the cost of action (or inaction), instead of as a way to shock the reader. The story can be cruel in places but it never comes across as edgy or explicit, I think is what I'm saying, and it's always balanced very well with Vasya's compassion and the certainty she has in her own right to agency.

If only more fantasy epics were so well-considered.