Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Naomi Novik is the author behind my beloved, dreadfully uneven Temeraire series about flying dragons in the Napoleonic war.  I have a lot of fond memories of that series, even as I remember endless battle scenes and not enough dragons for me.

So when I ordered Spinning Silver from the library, it was not clear to me what I would be getting. Something fun and fast-paced?  Something dreary and boring? Who knows?  It's a mystery!

Well, it was both, of course. This book was sold to me as a feminist retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin tale. Remember that fairy tale?  The king forces a girl into spinning gold from straw, but the girl only does it because she uses magic from Rumpelstiltskin. The girl agrees to give her firstborn to good old Rumpelstiltskin in repayment for his services, but when the girl's firstborn arrives, she reneges on the deal. Eventually she was able to get out of the deal by guessing Rumpelstiltskin's name. 

The first third of Spinning Silver was excellent. There was fantastic world-building and you meet two strong young women who are really holding their families together. 

And then we're introduced to a third young woman who is basically good at hiding.  And then it gets boring.  

Here's what I enjoyed:

1) There are multiple POVs in the book and the author doesn't treat you like an idiot and write the name of the character who is telling that chapter in giant letters at the beginning.  She assumes that the reader is smart enough to figure it out by using context clues. I appreciate that she's not writing down to me.

2) The characters of Miryem and Wanda are amazing. They're smart, capable of long-range planning, and cooperation.  

3) The world building was cool. There's this mundane world that lives right next to a fairy world, but the non-fairy people know not to mess with what's not theirs. It was interesting to see magic work, although I wish I had a slightly deeper understanding of the rules of magic.

Here's what I thought ruined the book:

1) Irina is boring. Her sections were never interesting because all she did was flee and speak in riddles.

2) The romance plotlines were not romantic at all.  I desperately wished for Miryem to just kill her husband and get it over with.

3) The main conflict was ill-defined and its ending even more so. It's almost as if Novik had spent all her planning in building the world and then didn't know how to wrap it up it a happy ending, so she just...kind of didn't.

Best quotes:

"I took as much of Da's work as I could. I didn't want to make a row of dead babies and die." (page 18)

I mean, right? Who does want that?

"It stopped even being a fortune, the way you could say a word too many times in a row and turn it into nonsense." (page 237-238)

I think "wider" and "descent" turn into complete nonsense after you say them more than three times in a row.  I was teaching a GMAT problem once and had to say "and wider" about six times in six sentences and by the end, I wasn't even sure what I was saying.

Words I looked up:

Boyar: a member of the old aristocracy in Russia, next in rank to a prince (page 69)

Mured: shut up in a closed space (page 87)

Dotard: an old person, especially one who has become physically weak or whose mental faculties have declined (page 282)