Before this week, if you had told me that one of my favourite fantasy books I’ve ever read would be a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin of all things, I would have laughed in your face. But that is one way to describe Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver, her follow-up to Uprooted (which was far and away one of my favourite books from a few years ago). Tonally, Spinning Silver is similar to Uprooted. Both feature a non-traditional European fantasy world, in that the Polish grounding for Uprooted and the Slavic folklore for Spinning Silver […]
It doesn’t even have to be snowy to love this book
I read The Bear and the Nightingale earlier this year when winter storms rocked Britain and loved nature’s contributions to the wintry atmosphere. I read the sequel, The Girl in the Tower, in Scotland’s sunniest month (May–somehow it’s always May) and loved this one even more–even if the weather didn’t contribute quite as much to the feel of it! The Bear and the Nightingale was loosely based on Russian folklore, following Vasilisa Petrovna and her family during a particularly harsh winter, as they fought the forces of […]