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elementarymydear 's review for:
Spinning Silver
by Naomi Novik
To quote Once Upon A Time’s Rumpelstiltskin, “Magic always comes at a price”. The price of magic – the price of anything, be it material goods or the choices we make – is a running theme through Spinning Silver.
Spinning Silver is a Rumpelstiltskin-inspired fantasy, set in the depths of Russian winter. The story follows Miryem, the daughter of a hapless money-lender, who takes the reins of her father’s failing business and quite literally turns silver into gold. While her family enjoy the change in their fortunes, she also attracts the attention of Staryk, the mythical king of winter, who makes Miryem his bride. Thrown into her new life, she is soon drawn into a world of dark magic, deals, and betrayal.
Read this and more reviews on my blog!
Miryem was a fantastic lead character, as were Irina (the daughter of a local lord) and Wanda (a village girl hired by Miryem). As a core set of characters they were really interesting, nuanced, and I felt invested straight away. (It did take me a few chapters to come around to Irina, but her character growth was just *chef’s kiss*). All of them had such different journeys but you couldn’t help but be with them every step of the way, desperate that everything should turn out alright. Naomi Novik has created a vivid, spell-binding world, and you couldn’t help but be transported across the world and right into the story alongside them. I did find the first half of the novel more convincing than the second half, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
The thing that was hardest for me was the changing perspectives. Novik jumps around different first-person perspectives without announcing who’s perspective we have moved to, and I really liked it at the beginning. There were only two or three perspectives to start with, and I found it challenged me and kept me engaged and more focused than I would have been otherwise. As the story progressed, however, we had half a dozen different first person perspectives, often in the same chapter, and I kept having to go back and remind myself who the narrator was at any given point. Had she stuck to just three perspectives I think it would have added to the experience immensely; by the end though, there were just too many.
That being said, the story kept me gripped right the way through, full of unexpected twists and an enchanting world. It’s one of the best and most imaginative fairytale retellings I’ve read, and I’m sure it will stick with me for a long time.
Spinning Silver is a Rumpelstiltskin-inspired fantasy, set in the depths of Russian winter. The story follows Miryem, the daughter of a hapless money-lender, who takes the reins of her father’s failing business and quite literally turns silver into gold. While her family enjoy the change in their fortunes, she also attracts the attention of Staryk, the mythical king of winter, who makes Miryem his bride. Thrown into her new life, she is soon drawn into a world of dark magic, deals, and betrayal.
Read this and more reviews on my blog!
Miryem was a fantastic lead character, as were Irina (the daughter of a local lord) and Wanda (a village girl hired by Miryem). As a core set of characters they were really interesting, nuanced, and I felt invested straight away. (It did take me a few chapters to come around to Irina, but her character growth was just *chef’s kiss*). All of them had such different journeys but you couldn’t help but be with them every step of the way, desperate that everything should turn out alright. Naomi Novik has created a vivid, spell-binding world, and you couldn’t help but be transported across the world and right into the story alongside them. I did find the first half of the novel more convincing than the second half, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
The thing that was hardest for me was the changing perspectives. Novik jumps around different first-person perspectives without announcing who’s perspective we have moved to, and I really liked it at the beginning. There were only two or three perspectives to start with, and I found it challenged me and kept me engaged and more focused than I would have been otherwise. As the story progressed, however, we had half a dozen different first person perspectives, often in the same chapter, and I kept having to go back and remind myself who the narrator was at any given point. Had she stuck to just three perspectives I think it would have added to the experience immensely; by the end though, there were just too many.
That being said, the story kept me gripped right the way through, full of unexpected twists and an enchanting world. It’s one of the best and most imaginative fairytale retellings I’ve read, and I’m sure it will stick with me for a long time.