Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale is a Russian fairy tale that requires an investment of your time and attention, but the payoff is so worth it! Arden painstakingly creates this world, the characters, the forest, the village, the home, the conflict – all of it, with such detail and ache and emotion.
A synopsis:
At the edge of the Russian wilderness, winter lasts most of the year and the snowdrifts grow taller than houses. But Vasilisa doesn’t mind—she spends the winter nights huddled around the embers of a fire with her beloved siblings, listening to her nurse’s fairy tales. Above all, she loves the chilling story of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon, who appears in the frigid night to claim unwary souls. Wise Russians fear him, her nurse says, and honor the spirits of house and yard and forest that protect their homes from evil.
After Vasilisa’s mother dies, her father goes to Moscow and brings home a new wife. Fiercely devout, city-bred, Vasilisa’s new stepmother forbids her family from honoring the household spirits. The family acquiesces, but Vasilisa is frightened, sensing that more hinges upon their rituals than anyone knows.
As danger circles, Vasilisa must defy even the people she loves and call on dangerous gifts she has long concealed—this, in order to protect her family from a threat that seems to have stepped from her nurse’s most frightening tales.
I loved Vasya, her father, and her siblings. I hated Konstantin but also pitied him (and then hated him some more). I was completely wrapped up in the Russian landscape and legends.
The pacing is slow but deliberate, and I encourage patience in the slower sections. The Bear and the Nightingale is the first in a trilogy, but unlike most YA series, is complete in its own right. Reading book 2 won’t be about finishing one story, but seeing what else might be ahead for this world and these characters.
BOOK:30 