Spinning Silver
Ratings366
Average rating4.2
Dnf 200.
Novik's prose flows very well. I can definitely see why people are spell-bounded by her work but I wasn't interested in the story at all. Just not for me unfortunately
This is one I'll get for the high school library. How cool to have a Jewish perspective in medieval/renaissance-set fantasy, and the Russian setting felt pretty authentic (though, when did potatoes come to Russia? Maybe the fairies brought them before Columbus...). I didn't have a problem with the multiple first-person narration, though though it is a bold choice and it did sometimes take me a few sentence figure out who was supposed to be speaking. Clever. I liked Uprooted more, but this one was very, very cool–and more captivating to me than the Temeraire books.
the first third is killer - wintery and atmospheric, with lush prose to match the folkloric tone, full of so many descriptions of ice and good red wool I wanted to curl up by a wood stove. just enough allusions to rumplestiltskin to feel familiar but with enough distance to be surprising. fun! the middle felt a little slow but didn't drag for me. the ending tied everything up very neatly in a way that felt tonally appropriate to fairy tales but maybe didn't have the depth or humanity of the earlier chapters. that said, this book went down real easy. I'd recommend it!
Perhaps closer to 4.5 but probably because I was listening to it and had a difficult time telling when the perspective switched.
I loved the setting, fairytale/folklore elements, strong female characters, Jewish representation, and I want more fantasy books like this.
I liked this, but it took a while to get used to the different POVs - and I like multiple POV books, I guess I'm just more used to a name or symbol at the top than I would have thought. (I suspect it'd be very frustrating in audio, if it's just one narrator.) I found the pace pretty slow and the writing could have used more editing, and trying to get back into the story over and over didn't help that impression.
I liked that there were several strong female protagonists, but just too many story threads for my taste. And again, I usually like that - just not here. Too much emphasis on winter and starving for reading this in November with winter, my least-favorite time of the year, coming on, probably... but I'm not likely to give this another chance in a different season.
I really liked this. I wished it was weirder but loved the characters, story, creatures, and descriptions on display here. The language is so rich and pitch perfect for the grim fairy tale/folklore feel of this book. It's like reading something written a hundred years ago in the best possible way. It has a blend of ordinary life and extraordinary elements, that make the world and the magic feel a little more real. It's also really moving in parts, with these brilliantly drawn human stories.
“There are men who are wolves inside, and want to eat up other people to fill their bellies. That is what was in your house with you, all your life. But here you are with your brothers, and you are not eaten up, and there is not a wolf inside you. You have fed each other, and you kept the wolf away.”
Definitely worth a read and pick up Uprooted while you're at it!
Good story. A bit convoluted and hard to tell the different POV. The voices of the characters were all the same.
Great story, I enjoyed seeing the characters evolve and women outsmart their situations. Wanda was my favorite heroine. My biggest critique is while the women were single they were protrayed as intelligent and determined to survive, yet at the end Irina and Miryem stayed married with their captors. I know this is a fairy tale re-telling and the men changed for the better, but the romance felt so shallow.
I had a good time listening to the audio book, but it was challenging recognizing when POVs changed. The narrator sublty changes her voice between the female characters so it's really easy to miss if you aren't fully paying attention.
I think I liked this one. I went into it expecting it to be a Rumpelstiltskin retelling and if it was, it was loose. The Staryk and Miryem flirting at the end was cute. I liked the relationship between Wanda and Miryem, but overall, I was bored and confused.
spinning silver stands as a certainly satisfying script selling substantial stories
A book that mixes magic and fairytales with Judaism. A Jewish girl, Miryem, loves her father but is watching him let the family starve because he won't fulfill his role as a money lender. Her grandfather is a wealthy man of the same profession, and she wants that wealth and comfort for her own family. This desire is spurred into action when her mother becomes sick. Miryem starts collecting the money herself. Little does she know what can happen to a girl who turns silver into gold.
“But it was all the same choice, every time. The choice between the one death and all the little ones”
Como siempre, naomi nunca decepciona. Es increíble como adhiere muchas descripciones y es capaz de escribir fantasia tan intrigante, personajes tan complejos que todos te agradan. Lo que si mucho no me gusto fue que habían demasiados personajes y a la hora de cambiar de punto de vista te perdes un poco.
4.2 stars. Possibly my first fractionated rating because I just personally loved the story and was immersed in it, even if not perfect! Its merits definitely won over its minor flaws.
Written in first-person POV of 6 different characters, and there is no explicit indication who. Yet the tone of voice lets me catch it quickly. The strength of this book is definitely the women characters who were resilient and smart. The Rumpelstiltskin inspiration is there but very loosely inspired. It's a long book but it was interesting enough for me to carry on.
The flaws would be that the explanation on how some things worked in the world, or the strategies undertaken by the characters were explained in too cryptic a manner for myself to understand, so I just glossed over it.
My Rating System:
5⭐️: Excellent book AND influenced a change in my views
4.5⭐️: Excellent read
4⭐️: Great read, will recommend ⬅️⬅️⬅️
3.5⭐️: Enjoyable read but missing something that will make it great
3⭐️: An okay read that I didn't regret spending time on it
2⭐️: Didn't enjoy
1⭐️: Didn't enjoy and had serious issues. Will suggest to avoid.
It takes a bit for things to start coming together, but when it does, it takes you for a ride. This was a deeply beautiful story. I loved so many of the characters. They held so much depth in their stories. I felt for them. I laughed and cried.
Trigger warning, though: child abuse
I didn't know what to expect with this book, and, to be honest, started reading it only because it's up for discussion this month in the Sci-fi and Fantasy Book Club here on Goodreads. I've been a member of this group for ages, but somehow couldn't get in the flow. Finally I've read a book in time to join it's discussion on 26th. Now I just need to not funk it, as I tend to do.
Having said that, would like to add that I enjoyed the book a lot. The only other time I came across Chernobog and other Slavic pagan myths was in American Gods and I had very (veeeery) mixed feelings about that book. I still can't bring myself to read anything else by Gaiman after AG. This one felt a bit like the fairy tales I grew up with, but had a nice fantasy spin.
DNF at 12%, so many books, so little time ... Novik is simply not for me, I DNFed Uprooted too ...
I'm one of the ones who really liked Uprooted and was looking forward to reading this new fairytale retelling by Naomi Novick, and I did enjoy it, but maybe not as much as Uprooted. What I did like was the atmospheric feel throughout that just exuded the ‘feel' of a fairytale. I also enjoyed Miryem as a character. It was nice to see a female character be the driving force behind changing the fate of herself and her family. Things I didn't enjoy as much were the very confusing shifting points of view. There was more than one instance that I was more than a page into a chapter before realizing whose perspective it was, which really threw me out of the story and forced me to re-read sections to get it straight. I also kinda missed having a bit of romance. I'm not one who requires romance to enjoy a book, but for some reason I felt the lack of it here. Having said that, it was my personal expectation that there would be a romantic side to it and not really a detriment to the book as a whole. Overall I didn't really emotionally connect with this one as much, so while it was still a very enjoyable read and I would recommend it, it also didn't quite blow me away.
I loved this book so much and was simply devastated when it was over. It's incredibly refreshing to read about Jews, especially in a semi-historical-though-in-this-case-also-fantastical setting, who are not ashamed of their identities. None of the Jews in this book were trying to assimilate, or become something else simply because they were marginalized by the society around them.
The riffs on fairy tales combined with the themes of self, family, love, and empathy were so moving. I could not put this book down.
This was a good solid 4-star read. I found that it dragged a little in the middle, but I was pleased enough by the ending to come away with a good impression of it.
Miryem is a moneylender's daughter who can turn silver into gold. Well, at least, she knows how to barter her silver well enough to get a gold coin back for each one. Unfortunately, her father the moneylender is too gentle and kind to collect his debts, so to prevent her family from going cold and hungry, she has to harden her heart and go out to run his business for him. Because of an ill-timed boast to herself about it in the forest, Miryem attracts the attention of the king of the Staryeks, a race of winter fae people who have been casually terrorising mortals for generations. Together with Wanda, the daughter of one of Miryem's debtors, and Irina, the daughter of a duke, Miryem has to find a way out of a supernatural conflict that threatens the lives of their people.
The characters of this book, love them or hate them, are really quite spectacular to behold (and not always pleasantly so). The female characters are generally strong, but I found them a little muted compared to the male ones, probably because they're more stable. Miryem is kind and can be generous, but generally she's calculative with her money. Wanda is unfortunately lacking in education, but she's physically strong and does what needs to be done to protect her brothers. Irina is... whew. Despite being a duke's daughter, she's downtrodden but grows increasingly... almost ruthless and manipulative as the book goes by. After all, she is the only one who can actually outmaneuver both Mirnatius and Chernobog. Honestly, at the end of the book when Irina was making these decisions to let Chernobog into the Staryek kingdom just to save her people, I was the most afraid of her than I was of the actual flame demon from Hell.
The male characters here are out of control! Wanda's father, usually known as “Da” when we see the story from her perspective, is a pathetic bullshit excuse of a human being that you would find yourself thinking violent thoughts about (and honestly, I found myself wishing his death had been even more violent than it was). But the two biggest characters here are Tsar Mirnatius and the nameless Staryek king. I spent the first half of this book thinking that these are some crazy toxic male characters, and indeed there's no denying that they are toxic. But by the end of the book, after learning more about them, you may find yourself re-assessing that. In any case, I like that they both had to be saved, quite physically, by Irina and Miryem respectively. I feel like the happy ending may not be to everyone's tastes, but I think the part of me that likes fairytales and happy endings very much enjoyed the way it played out, which is why I liked the book so much.
The narrative structure was OK, but may not be to everyone's fancy. It's told from a first person POV, but it switches fairly frequently between characters. We get at least 2 characters' POVs every chapter. There also isn't a clear indication of whose perspective we're reading from, which is probably a deliberate decision, but that also means you need to pay more attention to the context of what you're reading to figure out whose voice you're reading now. I thought that the POVs would be fixed between the 3 main female characters, but I was surprised later on with the POVs of some other side characters (namely Stepon, Mirnatius, Magreta - especially Mirnatius. I wouldn't have expected to see the POV from one of the "villains" of this book).
If you live in a country that experiences winter, this is a great book to whip out and read during that season. It's a book that takes place in and almost celebrates winter to some extent, with a dark fairytale vibe and a fairytale ending.
It was lovely to read this story. Yes, some parts of it were convoluted and abstruse but I thoroughly enjoyed it anyway. I loved the characters, they all felt real and well-fleshed out. Although I didn't always agree with their choices, I understood them.
I loved reading a book with three female characters who were strong in different ways, who had been beaten down by life but refused to just accept what the world thought was their due. I loved all three characters but I must admit to liking Wanda the most. The power of her 'NO' is something of beauty. Also, I loved the idea that if you proclaimed something to be true and when challenged did it 3 times, then you would possess that power. And then also, it was interesting how none of the characters including the tsar, was truly free. I ended up appreciating his character a lot. He who had been sold to this horrible thing from birth in order to appease his mother's aims of advancement. And then yet still, we had to pause to consider, what may she also have been fleeing in her life to make the bargain that she did? I liked this book because after reading it I was left considering the power of bargaining and all the ways big and small that we betray other people and ourselves in order to gain an easier, simple life. But also, the ways in which sometimes, we can put our own needs aside and simply fight for what's right even when it imperils us greatly. I loved the book and by the end hated none of the characters. Not even the Staryk King. They were all flawed characters who were trying to eke out a little enjoyment from an otherwise bleak existence. .
While I primarily read romance, I would have thoroughly enjoyed the book without any of the little romance it contained. In fact, I was a bit troubled by one of the romantic pairings as I didn't believe that relationship was based on mutual respect and regard. I understand the Staryk King because he and his people did to the Lithvians what Irina was willing to do to them and I still loved her anyway. However, I am ambivalent about his relationship with Miryem. I felt that he was unfeeling and condescending in the beginning with little respect for her personal autonomy. While their relationship may have changed during their 6 months together, the readers didn't get to see much of it. Also, there were no proper reparations nor apologies made for all the harm the Staryk had done. But I guess I wasn't mad that Irina made no apologies for possible harming the winter people. So I guess, I don't really know. I have complex feelings about their relationship and I would have liked the book more easily if their relationship wasn't a part of it. Still, that was one tiny aspect of an otherwise great book. And ultimately I feel like that lack of black and white is why I liked the book. For better or worse, I can't stop thinking about it.
As the pandemic hit, exhausted and strung out on adrenaline, I completely lost my ability to concentrate on books. And yet, Spinning Silver reached me with its deeply evocative setting, weaving together multiple American and Russian faerie tales with a modern sensibility to how to write strong female characters. This is also possibly the first high fantasy novel I've ever read to include Jewish characters.
I loved Miryem, Irina and Wanda, each strong in their own way, each determined to make her own way to bettering her life and that of her family. I liked the Staryk, with their icy alienness, yet truly a sympathetic villain. I liked the foil between the fire demon and the Staryk. Overall, it hit the sweet spot of combining a haunting setting, strong characters and a compelling plot.