Spinning Silver

What a compelling read! Really excellent fantasy / fairytale story with just a hint of romance novel tropes. Told consistently and well paced, with a lot of characters and complexity but always comprehensible. Really just a good scale of story.

The part I found most interesting was the feminist themes. All the main POV characters are women. Three of the most important are trapped by patriarchal figures; fathers, husbands, societal expectations. But never are they powerless or overwhelmed or irrevocably abused. They all persevere and succeed on their strengths, their intelligence, their skill. A hero fantasy, sure, but all the more interesting coming from a position of relative powerlessness as women.

The other theme I liked was the drawing from Slavic stories and fairytales. A comparison to Katherine Arden's Winternight Trilogy is inevitable. They're quite different books, no problem at all reading them in addition to Spinning Silver. But they are drawing from some similar source material and some of the story beats are similar. To me it made it all the more interesting since the outcome is so different.

I've liked pretty much everything of Novik's I've read now.