Even as I sat typing this review, I kept finding more aspects of the novel to love. There is much praise to heap at Novik’s feet for the creation she has wrought. What results is truly a battle of ice and fire. With a little meddling, the two heroines plot to pit their monsters against each other.
Beneath the Czar’s beautiful façade, a fiery demon smolders, one which desires not only to consume Irina but the entire kingdom of Lithvas.
Her sudden fortunes have little to do with luck, however sinister motives lurk.
Irina, a clever yet plain-faced woman of noble birth, finds her future prospects radically improved when Czar Mirnatius himself suddenly proposes marriage to her. He spirits her away to his icy kingdom where Miryem seems doomed to spend eternity-until, through a witch’s magic portal (and an odd twist of fate), she meets Irina. As her skill and profits continue to grow, however, she draws the attention of an ice king who is convinced her power of turning silver into gold isn’t marketplace cunning but magic. Pushed into desperation, Miryem picks up the trade herself…and finds she’s rather good at it. Miryem is the daughter of a moneylender who doesn’t so much lend money as give it away. It’s at these times I find solace in books like Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. I miss the hero actually living to the end of the story, and sometimes, sometimes, I miss the happy ending. I miss the classic tale of a heroic protagonist set on an impossible quest. Martin singlehandedly dismembered the fantasy genre. But every now and again, I miss the days before George R.R. By the end, half the characters are dead, most of the reader’s dreams have been shattered, and any of the possible happy endings we would have liked to have seen have been-at all costs-avoided. This is the kind of book that one might wish to inhabit forever.Don’t get me wrong. Readers will be impressed by the way Novik ties the myriad threads of her story together by the end, and, despite the book’s length, they will be sad to walk away from its deeply immersive setting.
Her work inspires deep musings about love, wealth, and commitment, and embodies the best of the timeless fairy-tale aesthetic. Novik probes the edges between the everyday and the extraordinary, balancing moods of wonder and of inevitability. Secondary characters-a peasant boy, a duke’s daughter, a tsar-eventually become narrators, weaving interconnections that feel simultaneously intimate and mythic. Novik ( Uprooted) begins the story through the eyes of Miryem, a Jewish moneylender’s daughter, whose pride in her ability to wring payments from borrowers draws the demanding attention of the terrifying, otherworldly, and rules-bound Staryk, who are ruled by a wintry, gold-loving king. This gorgeous, complex, and magical novel, grounded in Germanic, Russian, and Jewish folklore but richly overlaid with a cohesive, creative story of its own, rises well above a mere modern re.
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