SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Fantasy Book Review: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik: https://t.co/AxkofRkVtz Short Review: 5.5 out of 10 (1/3)

— garik16|CanesFan (@garik16) August 23, 2018

Short Review(cont): The spiritual successor to Uprooted, this book tells of a group of young women trying to outwit those who would use them-a Jew wanted by a Fae king for being able to turn silver to gold, most prominently. But the result is very muddled & disappointing (2/3)

— garik16|CanesFan (@garik16) August 23, 2018

Spinning Silver is the second novel (as far as I can tell) by Naomi Novik outside of her most well known work, her 9 book Temeraire series.  It is essentially a spiritual successor to her award winning Uprooted - not in a sense of the book having any shared continuity with Uprooted, but in it being another book where Novik weaves a story based around her own adaptation of various threads of folklore.  You may have seen Spinning Silver advertised in a fashion as a modern retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, but outside of the broadest outlines, it's more of a fresh adaptation of a hodgepodge of folklore into a more new story

That said, while I really enjoyed Uprooted (which deservedly won the Nebula), Spinning Silver was a bit more of a miss for me.  Where Uprooted had a single strong voice as its narrator, Spinning Silver begins with two narrators and adds more as the story goes along, with new voices showing up all the way through around 50-60% of the way through (there are six or seven such first person narrators in all, if I'm not miscounting).  Between that and the multiple plots of various scopes going on at the same time, the result for me was a book that was a bit muddled and often had me not caring at what was going on, even though I was interested in seeing what happened next for other parts.

More after the Jump:

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In Medieval Eastern Europe, Miryem is the granddaughter of a rich Jewish money-lender, but her father - another money-lender - is weak willed and allows his borrowers to escape repayment.  To save her family, she takes over her father's job herself, and becomes known a hard-nosed money-lender, known for the ability to take silver and turn it into gold.  Unfortunately, this ability brings her to the attention of the King of the Staryk, the magical people of Winter who raid the real world, who come to her and demand she change their silver into gold.  But when she achieves the same, she finds herself forced into the Staryk's own world where she is made their queen and the pawn of a King who hates her and has bad intentions toward her real world.

Wanda is a young woman whose father beats her and her two brothers and whose life of poverty is caused by his refusal to spend on anything but drink.  But when she goes to work for Miryem, she finds herself becoming self-supportive, and as events unfold she takes matters into her own hands to save herself and her family - both her blood family and her adoptive one.

And then there's Irina, the not-beautiful daughter of the Duke of Vysnia, who catches the attention of the Tsar Mirnatius and becomes his bride.  But what she soon discovers is that the Tsar is not what he seems, and is in the thrall of a dangerous demon, and her only escape can be found in her ability to enter the world of the Staryk.  But she cannot hide for long, and the Demon's hunger must be sated....

 These women will each make decisions to ensure the safety of their loved ones, and to take charge from situations where others would attempt to control their destinies......
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Spinning Silver is written in first person, although the narrator of the story shifts every so often and the book marks such shifts with clear paragraph breaks.  That said, the book leaves it to the reader to figure out who the new narrator is at any given switch - there is no external indicator like in Song of Ice and Fire as to who is thinking the following passage after a switch - and the book adds narrators as the story goes along, all the way up to around the middle of the story.  And since some of these narrators are in the same location at any given time, it can be a bit confusing whose thoughts you're actually reading - at one point, I didn't realize I was reading one character instead of another for about 3 pages.

Unfortunately some of these point of view characters fail to justify their existence.  Both Miryem and Irina are fascinating characters who wind up being our most important protagonists, even though Irina doesn't show up till about 60 pages in, with both being strong willed intelligent women who refuse to accept their unfortunate situations and set things in motion to try and change them.  That's not to say either of the two are the same - they each have different people they care about and are willing to do different things to secure their safety - but they both are sometimes seemingly-cold-hearted tricksters and I wish the book would've focused more solidly upon them.

The final heroine Wanda has a much more personal role in protecting her family and asserting her independence, and I don't think her story is bad in any way, but when it's put alongside the other two heroines who are struggling with much greater forces, it can't help but feel less interesting.  And the book doesn't simply limit its point of views to these three heroines, but also shows us the perspectives of several other lesser characters in their orbits, and never really justifies doing so....and often confuses in the process.

The end result was a book that sometimes dragged as less interesting storylines and characters took up page time up through the end, which was a problem.  Naturally everything comes through in the end to a nice neat end, which works pretty well, though the relationship endings seem to end up the way they do more because the author wanted them to rather than due to any particular chemistry.

In short, Spinning Silver was a book that showed a lot of potential, but really just wasted it trying to do too much with too many characters and created a book that I wanted to love a lot more than I did.  Others may like it more - I notice the book has gotten glowing reviews - but for me, it's a miss.