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A review by womanistdoc
Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
2.0
I’ll say something nice first: the author can write some beautiful prose. Her descriptions of landscapes, interior design, wardrobe are painstakingly and lovingly detailed.
The only issue is that many of these don’t push the story along, they’re just indulgent window dressing. Likewise, although I enjoyed the multiple narrators and seeing different sides of the same event from different points of view, we don’t need to hear no less than 4x exactly how the bad guy (the demon) is bad and what his evil plan is. It gets repetitive and slows down the action leading to the big climactic battle quite a bit.
For a book deeply concerned with morality, there seems to be a lot that goes undiscussed — the rapes and murders committed by the Staryk raiders, the way the novel shrugs about the Tsar’s (and the Staryk king’s) verbal and emotional abuse of those around him because he’s just so brooding and tortured.
The only issue is that many of these don’t push the story along, they’re just indulgent window dressing. Likewise, although I enjoyed the multiple narrators and seeing different sides of the same event from different points of view, we don’t need to hear no less than 4x exactly how the bad guy (the demon) is bad and what his evil plan is. It gets repetitive and slows down the action leading to the big climactic battle quite a bit.
For a book deeply concerned with morality, there seems to be a lot that goes undiscussed — the rapes and murders committed by the Staryk raiders, the way the novel shrugs about the Tsar’s (and the Staryk king’s) verbal and emotional abuse of those around him because he’s just so brooding and tortured.