Review: Spinning Silver

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Very glad to be done with this!

Definitely not as painful as Uprooted but still a really tedious read.

I have so many complaints I don't even know where to start.

The story is inspired by the Rumpelstiltskin legend, but instead turns Miryem into a moneylender who attracts the notice of an ice king. There's also a duke's daughter and a peasant family thrown into the mix.

Complaint #1: Multiple viewpoints
Normally this is a plus for me, but there was no clear identifier for who was actually telling the story. You had to infer it from the story as it unravelled and sometimes this was just not easy to do. Particularly as new viewpoints were introduced as the story went on. I got very confused. It also didn't help that the three main characters are young women of the same age who all seemed the same in the way they told the story.

Complaint #2: The writing
These were some of the most convoluted sentences I've ever read in my life. Double, triple negatives; long, meandering sentences that use 20 or so words where three would have sufficed. Not even classic literature is this confusing. It dragged the story out so much and often had me scratching my head trying to work out what had just been said.

Complaint #3: The pacing
This story could easily have been squashed into less that 400 pages. The first 100 or so drag out the whole Moneylender side of things when this could easily have been summarised in a single chapter. Then finally we get into the story and we're given yet another character who wants to tell us their story, and so the thing expands again. When things seem like they're going to wrap up soon, instead it's drawn out for another 200-odd pages. Add to this awful pacing the inclusion of those long sentences I mentioned and this became such a tedious read. It was so much effort to drag the story out of it.

Complaint #4: The complete lack of world-building
I love magic. I love fantasy. I love imagination. I love worlds created from nothing. But I still require some kind of explanation. This story just throws random pieces of magic at you with zero explanation and it's confusing. So much of the world is just thrust at you to accept instead of built logically. The concept of the Staryk is barely explored and yet we're soon to find ourselves heavily invested in them. How are we supposed to care when we can't fully grasp who they are, how many there are, how they live, where they live, etc? We're given bare bones enough to witness this one story but that's it. Nothing is ever really explained. Miryem's relationship with the King fascinated me but I just wanted to know more. What was the scale of the world compared to them and their story? I really needed more world-building. Obviously there's a heavy Russian influence, but are we to just assume that this fantasy story is set in Russia? I really struggled to grasp the extent of this world.

I think that's my major complaints. The story itself wasn't actually that bad, but it was drawn out way too long and told in such a dull way. It was better than I expected after the disaster that was Uprooted but it still wasn't great.

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