It's gold and silver all the way down.ĭumbfounding revelations about the nature of labor and debt, friendship and family curl within sentences like cats licking their paws, simple and pragmatic and mesmerizing at once. There are so many mathemagicians in this book, be they moneylenders turning silver into gold or knitters working to a pattern. As these women's paths cross during the most vicious winter in memory, they will learn from and teach each other all the shades and colors of debt and payment, gift and hospitality, responsibility and belonging. Miryem is the Jewish daughter of a soft-hearted moneylender who would rather live in poverty than collect his debts Wanda is the gentile daughter of an abusive alcoholic farmer and Irina is the part-Staryk daughter of a disappointed duke scheming for the throne. In Lithvas - a country ruled by a Tsar and his dukes, and harried by gold-hungry fairy creatures called the Staryk - three young women struggle to make the most of their lives. (Full disclosure: I, too, had a story in The Starlit Wood.) It's a sophisticated development of her short story by the same title published in the 2016 anthology The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales - itself a brilliant reclamation of 'Rumpelstiltskin,' digging deep into that story's anti-Semitism and pulling up something nourishing from the roots.

Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver is not a sequel to her 2015 novel Uprooted, though both are richly remade fairy tales set in fantastical versions of Eastern Europe with addictive voice work and characterization.

Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Spinning Silver Author Naomi Novik

Spinning silver