Spinning Silver.
****Spinning Silver
By Naomi Novik
Naomi Novik is the author of the Temeraire series and the graphic novel Will Supervillains Be on the Final? She was awarded the 2007 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the 2016 Nebula Award for Best Novel for Uprooted. Spinning Silver is a refashioning of Rumpelstiltskin.
THE STORY: In a medieval kingdom, Miryem, the daughter of an unproductive Jewish moneylender, takes it upon herself to lift her family out of poverty. She goes door to door, collecting money, refusing to take no for an answer. She then uses that money to buy things that she resells at a profit: turning silver into gold. Her talents attract the attention of the king of the unsavory Staryk, who, against her will, carries Miryem away to be his queen. Our second protagonist is Wanda, daughter of a man who, because of drunkenness, is unable to repay Miryem. He instead turns over his daughter to serve Miryem's family as housekeeper, a move that Wanda sees as an opportunity to build a better life for her brothers and herself. And Irina, a duke's daughter, enters into marriage with a dashing, but demonic, tsar. Del Ray. 480 pages. $28. ISBN: 9780399180989
Bookreporter ****
"Contrasting heat and cold, Jews and Gentiles, rich and poor, men and women, power and subservience, and then wonderfully turning it all around again. Spinning Silver is both an entertaining and thoughtful novel." SARAH RACHEL EGELMAN
Booksmugglers ****
"Channeling the vibrant heart of myth and fairy tale. Spinning Silver weaves a multilayered, magical tapestry that readers will want to return to again and again." THEA JAMES AND ANA GRILO
ChicagoTribune ****
"As befits a story with a climactic battle between an ice king and a demon tsar.... Novik grounds her story in folklore and fairy tales, quicksilver allusions to Grimm and Andersen. But this fairy land is all too human, riven by misogyny and bigotry, poverty and oppression." MICHAEL ROBBINS
Locus ****
"The novel widens its scope beyond the original fairytale, eventually including the destiny of two kingdoms, a haunted tsar, a sorcerous winter, and elements from Cinderella, among other stories, but the most important way it widens its scope is that Miryem and her family are explicitly Jewish. This is Jewish high fantasy, in which Jewish characters have interiority and agency, and some are more religious than others, and the Torah and its lessons inform how people think and react." LILA GARROTT
Tor.com ****
"Novik employs multiple narrative voices in Spinning Silver, a number of perspectives making up this deftly woven and highly immersive fairy tale, with all threads connecting eventually in a satisfying way." MAHVESH MURAD
Vox ****
"[Spinning Silver is] a bright new installment from an author who's poised to become one of the definitive YA voices of her era." CONSTANCE GRADY
CRITICAL SUMMARY
Novik offers a clever telling of Rumpelstiltskin, with the Booksmugglers reviewer proclaiming it a "nuanced, intricate narrative that plays with the most powerful fairy tale tropes," written with a grace that "Novik alone can achieve." And the Locus reviewer was impressed by the fact that Miryem and her family are "explicitly Jewish," with Judaism being foundational to the plot in "the same way that Christianity is the (mostly unexamined) substrate" of many fantasy novels. The reviewer suggests that, in this respect, Spinning Silver may be the first of its kind and that selecting a retelling of a story Rumpelstiltskin, which has been associated with a stereotypical view of Jews in medieval Europe, was a stroke of genius: "This book is an act of reclamation on a very deep level." A deep social commentary.
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| Publication: | Bookmarks |
|---|---|
| Article Type: | Book review |
| Date: | Nov 1, 2018 |
| Words: | 600 |
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