I put off reading this for a year because I was afraid I wouldn't like it as well as Uprooted, and then I liked it more! ( )

I've never been a huge fan of fairy tales--and I like most fairy tale retellings even less--but I was intrigued by the premise of this one. It seemed fresh and imaginative and fascinating. Unfortunately, it just didn't come together for me. I liked Miryem well enough, and I was instantly captivated by her story and her family's plight. But as the plot dragged on, I came to care less and less. I never engaged with any of the other characters, either. I didn't really care what happened to Wanda or Irina, and I thought the story dragged on and on -- with repetitive scenes and encounters -- so I had a hard time picking it up after setting it down.

I also didn't much care for the first-person point of view storytelling aspect from each of the characters. It was difficult to figure out whose viewpoint I was in with each scene, and it took me a long time to orient myself - especially when new characters were introduced, all with their own first-person viewpoint, most completely unnecessary. And finally, I didn't like the way some of the events in the book were repeated from multiple viewpoints. I already knew what happened, so it made me want to skim ahead and skip those parts.

I hear there's a novella version of this story in an anthology... I bet I'd enjoy that one a lot more than this slow and bloated rendition. ( )

2.75 stars

Miryam is a Jewish girl whose father is a moneylender, but he’s “soft” and doesn’t force the matter when people won’t pay him back. When Miryam’s mother gets sick, Miryam takes over for her father and manages to bring in some money. In addition, when one person is unable to pay what is owed, Miryam takes on his daughter, Wanda, to help out to pay back the loan.

In fact, Wanda prefers this than having her father hire her out to do all manner of things, and the abuse he piles upon her. Later on, one of Wanda’s younger brothers also comes to work for Miryam’s family. Miryam, unfortunately, catches the eye of a “winter king” of sorts, and is forced to marry him.

Meanwhile, Irina’s family has plenty of money and Irina is forced to marry the Tzar. She discovers that he seems to be “controlled” by some demon in a fire. The three storylines do converge.

I listened to the audio and was interested in the set up of the story, but it was hard to follow and I missed much of the middle section. We switched perspectives in the story a lot, and there was nothing obvious to indicate when the switch happened. Add to that, many (though not all) Russian names I don’t know and it remained difficult for me to figure out who we were following at various times. There were other perspectives we followed in addition to Miryam, Wanda, and Irina, as well. It always took me a while to figure out whose perspective we were following, so that probably a. took me out of the story, and b. half the time I never did figure it out. I missed too much of the story to rate it any higher, though I wanted to, especially at the start. ( )

This is a type of book I almost never read - what I might call "women's fantasy," a sub-genre that combines high fantasy and fairy tale tropes to tell a more involved, usually fairly internal story from the perspective of one or more women. Most such stories involve romance elements, sometimes quite dark ones. In my mind, this kind of book is typified by Robin McKinley's Beauty (1978) and a few other titles I read in my 20s - and then largely forgot.

If that description makes me sound outdated or a little prudish, that's not inaccurate. Just observing from the sidelines, this sub-genre seems to have exploded in the past 20 years, with many books straddling that somewhat subjective "Is it YA?" divide. And I have to admit some of my own prejudices are housed in my assumptions: I don't really want to read books for teenagers anymore; I don't really want to read romances. In particular, I have no special interest in reading books about the willing subjugation of women, no matter how idealized.

Spinning Silver came to me as a gift, and the person who gave it said exactly the right thing to pull me in: "This is a twist on [well-known fairy tale]." I like adaptations and I particularly like ones that subvert your expectations, so that intrigued me, for sure. Unfortunately it's a bad sales pitch for the book: without knowing that ahead of time, I might never have made the connection between the two stories. Even if I had, it wouldn't have been until about 200 pages had passed!

A better description of Spinning Silver would be that it uses fairy tale framework, and a fairy tale's narrative voice, to tell the story of three women who are bound by their backgrounds to seemingly immutable fates - and how they work to make their own futures instead. That makes it sound showier than it is, but most of the book revolves around the choices Miryem, the daughter of a poor Jewish moneylender, makes - and how she inadvertently sets the stories of Wanda (daughter of a violent drunk) and Irina (daughter of a duke with eyes on her marriage to the tsar) in motion. It takes a little getting used to their voices swapping out (and eventually expanding to include other characters), especially as there's no signal in the book to let you know who's speaking each time. But it does make a very internal story quite rich in detail, particularly in the moments where you realize two very different characters - usually separated by class - are witnessing the same events.

The fantasy element, when it shows up, is fantastical enough, although it seems more like an allegory for historical cruelty than a truly defined otherworldly creation. The winter and snow imagery for the Staryk race often leads to really gorgeous mental pictures, but their culture felt quite thin - too thin, at least, for the depth of story being told. I suppose that added to the fairy tale feel of it (fairy tales often telling their stories in broad strokes), but it left me a bit wanting by the end. The fantasy takes over in a rather grand way in the last quarter of the book, and I often found myself rolling along with it without being able to totally engage. Again, it didn't really help that I'd been led to expect the details of a well-known fairy tale, which ended up being more of a gloss than anything else. And the resolution comes abruptly, too - which is too bad, because up until about the last 50 pages, I was waiting for all the disparate, and mostly quite interesting, aspects of the story to cohere. That never quite happened.

Is it a good book? Yes, I think so, if not a great one. It was a very welcome companion during a long week where I really needed some distraction, and it probably swept away a few of my negative assumptions about this particular sub-genre. I find myself looking at a few other neglected volumes on my shelf and wanting to give them a try. At the same time, however, I know I won't read Spinning Silver again. I enjoyed getting to know the characters, and see inside their heads, but there isn't enough depth to come back and experience it twice. I'd rather hand it on to a friend - with a slightly more accurate description, of course! ( )

Beautiful to read. For some reason I took a long break from it before finishing it. Don't know why. ( )