It seems fitting that we’re arriving at a winter fairy tale today with The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden.
This was a beautifully written and engaging story that read like a Russian fairy tale. There are character you will adore and characters you will hate passionately, as well as a host of spirits and creatures taken from Russian folklore. It was a slow-moving plot, but it worked very well with the style, so I don’t see it as a bad thing.
I would say this is the perfect book for dark winter evenings while the snow is falling outside.
The Bear and the Nightingale
by Katherine Arden
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.
And indeed, crops begin to fail, evil creatures of the forest creep nearer, and misfortune stalks the village. All the while, Vasilisa’s stepmother grows ever harsher in her determination to groom her rebellious stepdaughter for either marriage or confinement in a convent.
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 still need to read this one! I will say, though, I like this cover better than the US ones.
I actually didn’t like this cover that much, but the only other edition I could get cost twice as much, and I don’t judge THAT much by the cover…
I think for me it’s the colors. The cover I usually see is much more subtle, almost bleak. It might fit the book (I suspect it does) and I might like that cover better once I’ve actually read the book, but right now I like the way the colors on this one pop.