el dang reviewed Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
Review of 'Spinning Silver: A Novel' on 'LibraryThing'
5 stars
An absolute joy of a book. It takes the form of a lot of fantasy and/or fairy tale cliches but repeatedly twists them into much more interesting things, and takes on some pretty grim thematic content without being a grim read overall. I loved how bluntly it dealt with antisemitism and the purposes that prejudice serves, and the repeated thread through the whole book of people who looked greedy or outright evil from the inside looking reasonable and/or desperate once the author lets us see the character's own perspective.
That said, I hated Miryem's ending. It felt like a very jarring return to fairy tale cliches, and I'm basically pretending that the last 2-3 pages of a book that I otherwise adored simply don't exist.
An absolute joy of a book. It takes the form of a lot of fantasy and/or fairy tale cliches but repeatedly twists them into much more interesting things, and takes on some pretty grim thematic content without being a grim read overall. I loved how bluntly it dealt with antisemitism and the purposes that prejudice serves, and the repeated thread through the whole book of people who looked greedy or outright evil from the inside looking reasonable and/or desperate once the author lets us see the character's own perspective.
That said, I hated Miryem's ending. It felt like a very jarring return to fairy tale cliches, and I'm basically pretending that the last 2-3 pages of a book that I otherwise adored simply don't exist.
