"A fresh and imaginative retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin fairytale from the bestselling author of Uprooted, called "a very enjoyable fantasy with the air of a modern classic" by The New York Times Book Review. Miryem is the daughter and granddaughter of moneylenders, but her father is not a very good one. Free to lend and reluctant to collect, he has left his family on the edge of poverty--until Miryem intercedes. Hardening her heart, she sets out to retrieve what is owed, and soon gains a reputation for being able to turn silver into gold. But when an ill-advised boast brings her to the attention of the cold creatures who haunt the wood, nothing will be the same again. For words have power, and the fate of a kingdom will be forever altered by the challenge she is issued. Channeling the heart of the classic fairy tale, Novik deftly interweaves six …
"A fresh and imaginative retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin fairytale from the bestselling author of Uprooted, called "a very enjoyable fantasy with the air of a modern classic" by The New York Times Book Review. Miryem is the daughter and granddaughter of moneylenders, but her father is not a very good one. Free to lend and reluctant to collect, he has left his family on the edge of poverty--until Miryem intercedes. Hardening her heart, she sets out to retrieve what is owed, and soon gains a reputation for being able to turn silver into gold. But when an ill-advised boast brings her to the attention of the cold creatures who haunt the wood, nothing will be the same again. For words have power, and the fate of a kingdom will be forever altered by the challenge she is issued. Channeling the heart of the classic fairy tale, Novik deftly interweaves six distinct narrative voices--each learning valuable lessons about sacrifice, power and love--into a rich, multilayered fantasy that readers will want to return to again and again"--
In medieval Russia, three young women, a Jew, a peasant & a noble, harden their hearts and rely on their wits to save themselves & the ones they love. Made much more difficult by the fairy king of winter and a firey demon.
An absolute joy of a book. It takes the form of a lot of fantasy and/or fairy tale cliches but repeatedly twists them into much more interesting things, and takes on some pretty grim thematic content without being a grim read overall. I loved how bluntly it dealt with antisemitism and the purposes that prejudice serves, and the repeated thread through the whole book of people who looked greedy or outright evil from the inside looking reasonable and/or desperate once the author lets us see the character's own perspective.
That said, I hated Miryem's ending. It felt like a very jarring return to fairy tale cliches, and I'm basically pretending that the last 2-3 pages of a book that I otherwise adored simply don't exist.
Wasn't expecting much from this book to be honest.
The beginning is like an Oliver Twist boring story and drags for a wee to long; but right after that it gains pace quickly and goes full speed into fantasy GoT-esque story.
Like quite a lot hope the story is told by multiple characters giving it a different edge without having to retell the same thing from multiple angles but instead moving the story forward all the time
Read right after re-reading her earlier fairytale novel, Uprooted, and this one is better and more complex, both more historically specific (the status of Jewish moneylenders as related to the Rumplestiltskin myth, the class dynamics of various towns and villages in an alternate Eastern Europe) and more conventionally fairytale-ish, with actual faeries (not called faeries, but a kind of wintry fae called the Staryk) and a cranky demon.
Couldn't stop reading.
Note: mild spoilers (just a little more than a dust jacket summary and list of characters)
Naomi Novik’s modern fairy tale, Spinning Silver, draws from Indo-European folklore, especially the story of Rumpelstiltskin. Novik is both upfront and subversive about the story’s roots, starting the novel by retelling the story of the miller’s daughter from the perspective of her tragically-worldly young protagonist, Miryem, who facing starvation and her mother’s illness becomes the debt collector for her inept money-lending father, Panov Mendelstam.
Miryem’s great ability to collect debts hardens her, while also garnering a reputation that she has an uncanny talent of creating gold, “spinning the silver” kopeks owed to her family and her opportunistic profits in the marketplace into gold zloteks. Both of these aspects of her development have consequences throughout the story. I’m going to keep the spoilers to the bare minimum to discuss my favorite aspect of the …
Note: mild spoilers (just a little more than a dust jacket summary and list of characters)
Naomi Novik’s modern fairy tale, Spinning Silver, draws from Indo-European folklore, especially the story of Rumpelstiltskin. Novik is both upfront and subversive about the story’s roots, starting the novel by retelling the story of the miller’s daughter from the perspective of her tragically-worldly young protagonist, Miryem, who facing starvation and her mother’s illness becomes the debt collector for her inept money-lending father, Panov Mendelstam.
Miryem’s great ability to collect debts hardens her, while also garnering a reputation that she has an uncanny talent of creating gold, “spinning the silver” kopeks owed to her family and her opportunistic profits in the marketplace into gold zloteks. Both of these aspects of her development have consequences throughout the story. I’m going to keep the spoilers to the bare minimum to discuss my favorite aspect of the story (the author’s point-of-view flipping), so aside from the summary of the plot setup in the next paragraph, I’ll focus on the art of the storytelling rather than the story.
In both this story and her 2015 novel Uprooted, Novik creates a mortal world on the edge of a perilous magical world. There it was The Wood, and here it is the Staryk World, a wintery land ruled by a king who lusts for gold and whose raiders plunder the Sunlit World, the land of Spinning Silver’s mortal protagonist. Miryem’s spinning draws the attention of the Staryk king, the parallel of Rumpelstiltskin, who provides magical silver and tasks her with three transmutations. She takes the silver to her grandfather’s city and pays her cousin Isaac to model a ring, a necklace, and a crown, which sets up the rest of the story involving the Tsar (along with his demon Chernobok) and the reluctant bride Irina.
Spinning Silver is a feminist text (it passes the Bechdel test hundreds of times and even Miryem’s grandfather is woke: “Gold doesn’t know the hand that holds it” he says to counter his wife’s assertion Miryem’s work is unseemly) and subverts class tropes both in the mortal world (with the Vitkus family and Magreta) and the Staryk world (with Flek and Rebekah, Tsop, and Shev.) The efforts of the disenfranchised of power and impoverished are crucial throughout the story and shake the aristocracy. It is also a story of otherness, both in the magical-vs-non-magical sense and, fundamentally, in its depiction of how necessarily careful are the interactions between Jews and the Gentiles surrounding them.
When Miryem is inclined to tell their neighbors about the Staryk, Panova Medelstam teaches by using a story about the Yazuda village where the houses of Jews were spared and people suspected they had betrayed them by dealing with the Staryk. She says, “And now there are no Jews in Yazuda.” Miryem reflects this “wasn’t elves or magic or absurdity…[but] something I understand very well. This theme of Jewish otherness returns many times throughout the story and is brilliantly portrayed, especially through the use of Stepon’s point-of-view. Stepon is a child already indoctrinated to discriminate against the Mendelstams who learns through kindness and shared experience to evolve. This was a brilliant use of point-of-view.
Novik uses first-person point-of-view with minute psychic distance, changing the narrator throughout the story. There are 69 separate sections spread across 25 chapters. 28 feature Miryem, Wanda Vitkus gets 14, Tsarina Irina has 13, young Stepon tells 7, Magreta (Irina's chambermaid) contributes 5, and Mirnatius (a villain) shares his possessed tale twice. Each character has an original voice and critical perspective. Irina, for example, allows us to perceive how women are treated like commodities in aristocratic marriages, though through brilliant collaboration they can invert their situation.
The transformation of the characters is significant. I’ve already mentioned Stepon, but Wanda and Miryem end up radically different from the story’s beginning. Miryem, the brilliant debt collector who complains about clients who do not adhere to bargains, for example, gets an important lesson that a little flexibility is better for everyone. Foreshadowing, such as leaving tunnels filled with silver around, pays off throughout the tale. The novel is well-constructed and Novik’s conversational, easy-voiced storytelling is warm and relatable.
I recommend Spinning Silver for all these reasons but mostly because it is a well-told, great story that is a lot of fun. Novik just keeps getting better. I can’t wait for what comes next.
:-)
