Thursday, May 24, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden





The Bear and the Nightingale is the first in a trilogy that essentially tries to modernize Russian Fairy Tales/Folklore.  The book's obvious comparison is Naomi Novik's Nebula winner Uprooted (and Novik blurbed the book, so yeah).  But while the book shares similarities to Uprooted in its setup and tone - and also feels to me a bit like Robin McKinley's "The Hero and the Crown" - it fails to put together a resolution comparable to either of those novels and as a result, its ending feels abrupt and isn't quite satisfying.  This is the first of a trilogy, and while the book doesn't end on a major cliffhanger, it didn't feel like a complete novel to me either.

More after the Jump:

-------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------
 Years ago, a strange woman - said by some to be a Witch - came from the forest and married a Prince of Russia.  Her daughter, Marina who clearly possessed no witchly powers, married Pyotr, a Russian Noble from the country, and had a loving relationship with him as well as several children.  But one day Marina tells Pyotr that she will have one more daughter, who will carry her mother's enchantments, and so her last daughter Vasilisa aka "Vasya" for short is born.

Vasya loves her family and they love her, but it is not hard to see there are strange things about her.  She alone can see the Russian spirits all around her, the ones that the people leave offerings for, and can talk and learn from them.  But when her father goes to Moscow, a strange being in the shape of a man forces her father to take a blue amulet to give to her.  And Vasya has had strange visions and encounters with mysterious forces seeking her in the forest.

Then her father comes home with a new wife who can also see the spirits, but thinks they are demons.  And when a priest comes and turns the people away from their offerings to the spirits, dark and cold things begin to happen in the Wood.  For the legendary Frost Demon is not the only thing that lies in the wood, but something far darker, far more evil, and as the people other than Vasya turn away from the spirits, it becomes stronger and only Vasya can see the true evil growing.....
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Where The Bear and the Nightingale is a triumph is in setting up and building its world and characters (with one exception on the character front).  Each of the members of Vasya's family are different from one another and are interesting characters in their own rights for however long they stay on the page.  The world, with all its spirits that Vasya encounters, is also very interesting, and even the politics of Russia in this time-span always makes sense.  This is an excellent world, set up by the first two parts of the book extremely well.  And Vasya is an excellent protagonist, who sees the world differently from everyone else and doesn't see how that's strange and simply acts to try and do the best for everyone, quite innocently, without being too naive.

The only character I found lacking was one of the antagonists, a priest who comes to the village and starts driving the community to stop giving tributes to the spirits in favor of simple praying to Christ and thus causes the main antagonist to gain in power.  I could believe that activity to be honest, but said priest later shows such a gullibility that just struck me as a bizarre reaction for a priest preaching against spirits who is suddenly communicated to from an unseen force.

But really where the book fails is in using all of this world and character building.  The book very quite clearly hints that the being trying to aid Vasya and seeking her aid in defeating the evil in the forest is the Frost Demon introduced in the first chapter, but it takes 75% of the book for Vasya to finally meet him.  That part of the book very much reminds me of The Hero and the Crown (where Aerin meets Luthe), only nothing done in this segment by Vasya actually contributes to the ending, which is resolved seemingly at random by kind of a deus ex machina unsatisfactorily that had not been set up at all (by contrast, THatC's big conflict also ends extremely quickly and kind of anticlimactically, but there is more of the book left afterwards and the ending is at least partially foreshadowed and stems from Aerin's learning).  Basically we spend the entire second part waiting for the third part to start, and then the third part has the training segment be not really important towards resolving this book's major conflict. 

I suspect, given that this is a trilogy, that the 3rd part really was meant to set up the second book in the series (and the third), as were several other character introductions that go nowhere.  But the end result is that THIS book kind of fizzles out, and it's not a satisfying way to end the story.  I will probably read the sequel, because the book did have a lot of promise in the setup, but I will have a low tolerance of it if it doesn't grab me from the start.

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