Bingo Review 6 (Remix)
I am loving this Bingo thing; it’s forcing me to pick up things I’ve been wanting to read but have hesitated to start for various reasons. Spinning Silver is one of these books. I really loved Naomi Novik’s Uprooted fairy tale retelling, and Spinning Silver does a lot of the same things. The biggest change though is also my biggest complaint. Verdict: Spinning Silver is a distant silver to Uprooted‘s gold.
Spinning Silver is a mix between a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin and general European fairy tale tropes. The story is set in quasi medieval Slovakia (I think), and most of the action takes place in the region near the town of Vysnia. There are 3 threads that gradually weave together. Thread 1 is Miryem, the Jewish daughter of a reluctant money-lender who takes over her too-non confrontational dad’s work in order to get the family out of near poverty. She gets good at it, and makes more money by buying and selling goods at the town market. She makes a claim that she can turn silver into gold, and as it just so happens the supernatural winter-demon (called a Staryk) ruler of the nearby forest overhears her and decides to challenge her claim. Thread 2 is Wanda and her 2 brothers Stepon and Sergey. Wanda’s father owes Miryem’s family money but can’t pay because he gambles and drinks and has a family he can hardly feed. Miryem decides that Wanda can pay off the family debt by working for her family, sine Miryem’s mom is sick, and Wanda’s happy to get away from her abusive father. Thread 3 is Irina, the daughter of a local duke who isn’t terribly pretty and who may have some Staryk ancestry from a few generations back. She ends up married to the tzar Mirnatius because he is possessed by a fire demon who wants to consume Irina’s life force. Adventures ensue as Miryem is taken by the Staryk king to make fairy silver into gold, Wanda has family issues to deal with, and Irina has to navigate her new husband’s court and demonic counterpart.
{Warning: a few general spoilers follow.}
The Staryk realm follows a lot of rules of general folklore, like the importance of 3 times, bargaining and promises, and the importance of true names. The problem is that Miryem and the Stryk king don’t like each other, and he only took her because he promised (probably thinking he wouldn’t have to when she failed his 3 challenges), and she doesn’t know the ways of this new place. She gradually makes friends and allies, and eventually helps the Staryk king save his people from the fire demon. The lack of a princess-y love story was refreshing to say the least
I like the characters and the plot, especially how Miryem gradually gets to know the Staryk realm, and she and the king gradually get to understand each other- kinda. The thing I really didn’t like, that made the whole thing much harder for me to read was the fact that the novel switches between about 6 narrators, all first person, at random points, which means that sometimes you can’t tell right away that the narrator has changed, and who is it this time. One of Wanda’s brothers gets a turn, as does Irina’s nurse Magreta, and I think even Mirnatius gets a section or two. Their voices are all so similar that it really dampens the individual characters.
Overall, a good story that could have been a little better told.