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sophia_sol) wrote2018-11-04 07:21 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2018-11-04 07:21 pm
Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik
The latest novel by Naomi Novik, another in the fairy-tale-inspired style of Uprooted. This one is...kind of a Rumpelstiltskin story and kind of the Cinderella variant wherein the dead mother helps her daughter through a tree planted over her grave, and kind of a bunch of other stuff as well.
It's told in rotating first-person POV mostly focusing on three young women (Miryem, Wanda, and Irina) but occasionally going to other people including Irina's nursemaid, Irina's husband, and Wanda's younger brother.
Each of the three main young women have their own priorities and their own plotlines, but their stories intersect and affect one another significantly.
There are so many women in this book with so many different kinds of power and competence and I love ALL OF THEM from a scullery maid mentioned for all of one sentence on up. Irina and Miryem are the most obvious: both of them are in a position of rulership, and Miryem develops actual magic powers while Irina is extremely skilled at political manipulation. I love that the narrative allows them both their power and the force of their opinions even when the two of them disagree rather, uh, significantly about the appropriate actions to take to make things be the way they ought in their uneasy alliance.
But there's also Magreta, Irina's old nursemaid, and when you get to the part of the book where she tells some of her backstory you realize where Irina must have learned at least some of her skills in manipulation because Magreta, despite coming from unfortunate circumstances, is incredible at continually making a space for herself proactively in such a way that nobody notices what she's doing.
And Wanda, whose strong hands and quiet willingness to work saves Miryem's mother's life - and who learns the magic of math and is able to use this new knowledge proactively. Wanda isn't as flashy as Miryem and Irina but she's so solid.
And Miryem's mother, whose love is transformative for Wanda and her brothers who grew up in an abusive household.
And of course that scullery maid who actually deals the final blow on the demon who's been possessing Mirnatius. Irina makes the demon leave Mirnatius's body through sensible trickery but then the scullery maid who's in the room sees Mirnatius disgorge an unnatural burning thing onto the floor and immediately dumps a bucket of sand and ash on it to smother it out. Because she has excellent fire safety instincts that are not at all dampened by Weird Shit going on.
Amazing. I love them all.
(small shout-out to my favourite men in the book though, Miryem's practical banker grandfather and kind-hearted failed-moneylender father.)
One of the things I'd heard about this book before I read it is that it follows the same pattern of romance type as Uprooted, and I was thus preemptively annoyed going into this book because the romance stuff in Uprooted REALLY bugged me. But although everyone is definitely right about this romance being of a similar type (and the pattern overall is....really not great), the main romance in Spinning Silver actually totally works for me!
So like: both romances are about an unnaturally older male-gendered being who is extraordinarily powerful and a young woman who is terrified of him and under his control. But in Uprooted where it's a creepy teacher-student dynamic between two humans (plus there's an extremely obvious f/f ship option that would have been FAR SUPERIOR that the book totally ignored and I'm still bitter about that too), in Spinning Silver between Miryem and the Staryk, the powerful older man feels himself to be just as much forced into the relationship as the young woman does, and also he's basically a rigidly moral but totally baffled alien. And that makes it INCREDIBLE.
Political power struggle between two extremely competent people married to each other against their will who continue to totally misunderstand each other and what's going on because of enormous cultural disconnects: YES PLEASE. I love it. The relationship between Miryem and her Staryk king is great. And the way their story ends is PERFECT.
The relationship between Irina and Mirnatius though.......hm. I am actually completely unsure how the author intends the reader to understand the conclusion of that particular arc but I'm a little concerned it's supposed to be read as being the beginning of a genuine romantic relationship in the end. Mirnatius has very much a sob-story backstory, which has affected the kind of person he's grown up into and that's sad for him and all, but the kind of person he's grown up into is an absolute dick. But Irina has the hots for his physical appearance, and at the end Mirnatius finally thinks she's beautiful (after an entire book of everyone thinking she's astonishingly gorgeous because of magic reasons that don't affect him and he goes through life angrily going BUT SHE'S SO PLAIN WTFFFF), and also she saved him from a literal demon possessing his body so he's very grateful, but like. Are we supposed to be cheering on their marriage?
Mirnatius is very much not a catch, and he doesn't care a bit about politics and has no idea how to be any kind of reasonable human, and I just don't see it working out happily between them unless Irina just treats him as a puppet king and they enjoy having sex with each other and nothing else. Which I could see? But I'm not sure that that's what the book's going for. I've definitely seen at least one book review referring to that relationship as a romance, and I'm generally willing to accept that just about anyone other than me is a better judge of whether there's cues of romancey things going on. SIGH.
At any rate the book doesn't really focus on their developing relationship (or lack thereof) so this is ultimately a minor and mostly ignorable detail when everything else about the book was incredible. And I haven't even mentioned other stuff I liked, like the worldbuilding, the details of the Staryk culture, the way Judaism is included, and more. So much good stuff! I absolutely devoured this book, it was so compelling.
It's told in rotating first-person POV mostly focusing on three young women (Miryem, Wanda, and Irina) but occasionally going to other people including Irina's nursemaid, Irina's husband, and Wanda's younger brother.
Each of the three main young women have their own priorities and their own plotlines, but their stories intersect and affect one another significantly.
There are so many women in this book with so many different kinds of power and competence and I love ALL OF THEM from a scullery maid mentioned for all of one sentence on up. Irina and Miryem are the most obvious: both of them are in a position of rulership, and Miryem develops actual magic powers while Irina is extremely skilled at political manipulation. I love that the narrative allows them both their power and the force of their opinions even when the two of them disagree rather, uh, significantly about the appropriate actions to take to make things be the way they ought in their uneasy alliance.
But there's also Magreta, Irina's old nursemaid, and when you get to the part of the book where she tells some of her backstory you realize where Irina must have learned at least some of her skills in manipulation because Magreta, despite coming from unfortunate circumstances, is incredible at continually making a space for herself proactively in such a way that nobody notices what she's doing.
And Wanda, whose strong hands and quiet willingness to work saves Miryem's mother's life - and who learns the magic of math and is able to use this new knowledge proactively. Wanda isn't as flashy as Miryem and Irina but she's so solid.
And Miryem's mother, whose love is transformative for Wanda and her brothers who grew up in an abusive household.
And of course that scullery maid who actually deals the final blow on the demon who's been possessing Mirnatius. Irina makes the demon leave Mirnatius's body through sensible trickery but then the scullery maid who's in the room sees Mirnatius disgorge an unnatural burning thing onto the floor and immediately dumps a bucket of sand and ash on it to smother it out. Because she has excellent fire safety instincts that are not at all dampened by Weird Shit going on.
Amazing. I love them all.
(small shout-out to my favourite men in the book though, Miryem's practical banker grandfather and kind-hearted failed-moneylender father.)
One of the things I'd heard about this book before I read it is that it follows the same pattern of romance type as Uprooted, and I was thus preemptively annoyed going into this book because the romance stuff in Uprooted REALLY bugged me. But although everyone is definitely right about this romance being of a similar type (and the pattern overall is....really not great), the main romance in Spinning Silver actually totally works for me!
So like: both romances are about an unnaturally older male-gendered being who is extraordinarily powerful and a young woman who is terrified of him and under his control. But in Uprooted where it's a creepy teacher-student dynamic between two humans (plus there's an extremely obvious f/f ship option that would have been FAR SUPERIOR that the book totally ignored and I'm still bitter about that too), in Spinning Silver between Miryem and the Staryk, the powerful older man feels himself to be just as much forced into the relationship as the young woman does, and also he's basically a rigidly moral but totally baffled alien. And that makes it INCREDIBLE.
Political power struggle between two extremely competent people married to each other against their will who continue to totally misunderstand each other and what's going on because of enormous cultural disconnects: YES PLEASE. I love it. The relationship between Miryem and her Staryk king is great. And the way their story ends is PERFECT.
The relationship between Irina and Mirnatius though.......hm. I am actually completely unsure how the author intends the reader to understand the conclusion of that particular arc but I'm a little concerned it's supposed to be read as being the beginning of a genuine romantic relationship in the end. Mirnatius has very much a sob-story backstory, which has affected the kind of person he's grown up into and that's sad for him and all, but the kind of person he's grown up into is an absolute dick. But Irina has the hots for his physical appearance, and at the end Mirnatius finally thinks she's beautiful (after an entire book of everyone thinking she's astonishingly gorgeous because of magic reasons that don't affect him and he goes through life angrily going BUT SHE'S SO PLAIN WTFFFF), and also she saved him from a literal demon possessing his body so he's very grateful, but like. Are we supposed to be cheering on their marriage?
Mirnatius is very much not a catch, and he doesn't care a bit about politics and has no idea how to be any kind of reasonable human, and I just don't see it working out happily between them unless Irina just treats him as a puppet king and they enjoy having sex with each other and nothing else. Which I could see? But I'm not sure that that's what the book's going for. I've definitely seen at least one book review referring to that relationship as a romance, and I'm generally willing to accept that just about anyone other than me is a better judge of whether there's cues of romancey things going on. SIGH.
At any rate the book doesn't really focus on their developing relationship (or lack thereof) so this is ultimately a minor and mostly ignorable detail when everything else about the book was incredible. And I haven't even mentioned other stuff I liked, like the worldbuilding, the details of the Staryk culture, the way Judaism is included, and more. So much good stuff! I absolutely devoured this book, it was so compelling.
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