Review: Spinning Silver

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Naomi Novik is doing some wonderful stuff lately. I was starting to feel that the flaws in her Temeraire series were outweighing the strengths, and then she started writing standalone fantasy novels like this, and like the excellent Uprooted.

It's a twist on the Rumpelstiltskin story, but it isn't at all closely constrained by its source material. There are at least three protagonists and several more viewpoint characters (one of whom was a bit of a surprise, and a signal, for me, that that particular character might have a shot at redemption, unlikely as that seemed); the main three are all capable young women who are treated, by their culture and by the men who surround them, as far less than they actually are. They decisively prove that underestimation to be wrong.

One is the daughter of a Jewish moneylender, and I'll admit that I set the book aside for a while and read other things because I was worried about which particular other shoes would drop for a Jewish family in an analog of Eastern Europe in what seems like the 18th or 19th century.

(view spoiler)[Happily, there is no pogrom, but there is plenty of tension and risk and high stakes nonetheless.

I wondered if a story like this, that is set up with so much potential for terrible tragedy all the way around, might have what I call the Glorious Ending, where someone makes a decision out of love and self-sacrifice that takes a story that seems destined for inevitable tragedy and turns it into a triumph. When I finished it, I didn't quite feel that it had hit the full Glorious Ending, but on reflection I'm going to grant it. It came so close that I felt the heat of it, at least.

I did wonder what was going to happen with the two unwanted and malevolent husbands. Were they just going to kill each other and leave the women in possession of the field? In the end, it was something more sophisticated than that, though I wasn't fully comfortable with the resolution; it plays a bit too close to the trope of "I believe my abuser can change if I stick with him," and that probably lost the book its potential fifth star. (hide spoiler)]

With those caveats, I found the story engaging, the characters powerful, the sense of tension and the stakes compelling, and the plot well-paced. It's not every author who can pull off a book with this many viewpoints and with three or four major plot threads closely intertwined, but Naomi Novik is definitely one who can.

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