Book: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
Genre: Fantasy
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
What a lovely fantasy story! It's a very loose retelling of Rumpelstiltskin in which we have our girl who is so smart and takes over her dad's money lending business... in so doing she ends up making a ton of money... thus... she turns silver into gold.
Well, so when the Staryk king (the mystical people who rule the winter) gets wind of this, he comes to her and demands he turn his silver into gold. If she doesn't he will kill her, he if does, he will marry her. What a choice she has, yes? Because let's just say he's not a very a nice dude.
Meanwhile, we get the stories of several others characters, with the assumption that all the stories will converge at some point, and of course they do.
One of them is the peasant girl who ends up working for our girl who is turning silver into gold. And how she and her brothers have to deal with abuse in their house and how they try to escape it. And how that ends up getting them right in the middle of the craziness that's about to go down.
And the other one is the girl who ends up being forced to marry the tsar. Turns out that tsar is possessed. And she needs to figure out a way not be killed by the demon.
And it all goes down when the girls try to destroy the various monsters ruling them, and how that showdown is basically a fight between fire and ice.. .and wow. It's crazy!
But then... are they really happy to be the ones destroying these guys in their lives? Hmmm....
I really loved the rich detail and beautifully story telling. I really needed romance though... I really thought I was going to get romance! AHHH!!! So other than that, everything else was fabulous!
