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A review by codexmendoza
The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
2.0
Look maybe it’s my own fault for reading a YA novel, but this book has such a cringey self insert energy. Everyone loves the heroine or secretly is jealous of her so they hurt her. She’s described as a “witchy fey little thing” ad nauseam and given knowledge that outstrips all the blind people around her in addition to being the most special girl in the world due to her mysterious bloodline. Also she can talk to horses. Every supporting character is made more cartoonish and unreasonable in order to burnish her light and it destroys any tension in the story.
Plus points for the unique setting inspired by Russian folktales, but it also means that everything good in this book is built on something created by someone else and underneath the gilt paint, the prose and plotting aren’t terribly interesting. Ultimately, I would rate this higher for the setting, but this book also has this undercurrent of eating disorder romanticism — the heroine starves herself secretly to “save everyone” by feeding the house spirits, self harms for the same reason, and vomits quite a bit. All ostensibly for plot reasons, but it’s as transparent as a tumblr aesthetic blog.
Just because it’s better than the median YA novel doesn’t make it good.
Plus points for the unique setting inspired by Russian folktales, but it also means that everything good in this book is built on something created by someone else and underneath the gilt paint, the prose and plotting aren’t terribly interesting. Ultimately, I would rate this higher for the setting, but this book also has this undercurrent of eating disorder romanticism — the heroine starves herself secretly to “save everyone” by feeding the house spirits, self harms for the same reason, and vomits quite a bit. All ostensibly for plot reasons, but it’s as transparent as a tumblr aesthetic blog.
Just because it’s better than the median YA novel doesn’t make it good.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Eating disorder and Self harm