Bite-Sized Book Reviews: “Spinning Silver”

Full disclosure: I bought this book way back in July. But I’ve delayed reading it for this simple reason: Naomi Novik’s last book (Uprooted) ruined my life. While I was reading it, I skipped workouts. Forewent human companionship. Stayed up to 3 am reading, when I had to be into work by 7:30 am. All because I.couldn’t.put.Uprooted.down.

Since the moments in adult life when one can just opt out and read are rare, I knew I had to be strategic about cracking Spinning Silver.

But my self-discipline finally cracked. Again, I stayed up stupid late to finish–1:49 am. (Or so my husband told me after I knocked over our shredder in the dark and woke him up.) But I can now report that if Spinning Silver isn’t quite as compulsion-inducing as its predecessor, it’s still darn good. In other words, if it missed the 99 mark, it scored a thoroughly-deserved 98.

Spinning Silver is an incredibly clever retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, with so much of Novik’s own intricate plotting and world-building woven throughout that finding those Rumpelstiltskin references is like spotting a bread crumb along an unfamiliar and alluring path. At the novel’s heart is Miryem, the daughter of a moneylender. Her talent for turning silver to gold draws the terrifying notice of the king of the Staryk, a race of ice fey slowly burying Miryem’s land under endless winter. Her efforts to save herself and her family entangle her fate with that of Wanda, a peasant girl, and Irina, the new bride of the young tsar… a man whose own secret threatens his kingdom and the Staryks’.

Bite-Sized Book Reviews: “Uprooted”

As you’ve likely sussed out by now, I’m a fan of reading. But rare is the book that tempts me to sacrifice my own writing time. It’s been ten months since that last occurred. (That siren was Kate Forsyth’s The Wild Girl, which I review here). But Naomi Novik’s Uprooted called too sweetly to be resisted. I wound up rolling two hours of writing time into the weekend, because I blew them off on Thursday to finish the book.

That wasn’t the only irresponsible thing I did, either. I stayed up until 1 AM, when I had to be into work by 7:30. I thought I’d skim just a few pages before I did my post-work lap-swimming… I wound up reading in the pool locker room for an hour. Uprooted was that compulsively readable; I had to know what happened next. And I definitely wasn’t confident about how it would end: I could see the author taking the triumphant track, or the bittersweet one. (But no spoilers here–you’ll have to read it yourself to find out!)