Spinning Silver
Aug. 24th, 2018 05:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraSpinning Silver, Naomi Novik. Standalone novel, expanded from the novelette in Starlit Wood, but you definitely don't need to have read that.
A general spoiler-free opinion behind this first cut: highly recommended, particularly if you have any interest in fairy tales or in Judaism in sff.
And then, behind this second cut and a bit of space, a longer, spoilery discussion about the book and some aspects of the story:
a
bit
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So this is probably the novel of the year, for me. I know it's only August and I haven't read that many 2018 works yet and there's some good stuff on the horizon so who knows, but this is definitely now the book to beat. I want to recommend it to everyone who reads fantasy, and give a copy to my mom even though she never reads anything I give her (but she would like them if she would), and buy a copy to leave on the bookshelf for Junie to pick up in a few years. And you will definitely be seeing it on my Hugo nominations. It is so beautiful and well-constructed and meaningful and made me cry like three times and is so much a story that I needed right now.
For people who are curious how it relates to the novelette: the novelette story is basically the first part of the book, with two more POVs added for the book, and then some things go in a different direction and break out into the larger plot of the rest of the book. There's definitely an entire novel's worth of story here and I thought she did a good job of retaining the core coolness of the novelette while also going way, way beyond it.
It was so interesting to me how some of the same themes she's been working with in her fanfiction turn up here too - like, this really felt of a piece with her fanfic. (Which, I probably should spell out, is GOOD and meant as PRAISE - she's my favorite fanfic author and I reread her fic all the time and I am more or less constantly on the lookout for any original fiction that's nearly that good. (And most of her stuff for awhile lately is basically original fiction to me anyways, given my lack of canon familiarity.)) Honor and loyalty, duty and responsibility, being the best version of yourself even/especially when that's hard, solidarity... there's some really powerful stuff in Spinning about not just standing by while the fire eats other people's children, even if it keeps yours safe for awhile, which a) is a moral point that can't be made too many times and b) is more or less right in a line with some of her Transformers work, of all things. And there are certain things in the style particularly around the romantic pairings that felt written for the very story-literate fanfic-type audience, to me, the way the reader is expected to pick up on things and fill in some of the relationship blanks with our own genre understanding.
Relatedly, I'll be curious to see whether it bothers anyone this is very much a book in which brave and good young women have to do the work of humanizing their narratively-assigned marital partners into people it's actually possible to have a relationship with. It didn't bother me because it felt like such classic fairy-tale business (freeing one's prince from a curse, etc), and because I *like* the whole dynamic of women being clever/badass/passionate/etc and dudes slowly realizing how excellent they are (Strictly Ballroom *is* my favorite movie), but people who are turned off by redemption/romance arcs for men who initially do not recognize or respect the protagonist's personhood are maybe not going to be thrilled with Novik's choices there. I know some people were bothered by similar things in Uprooted. I felt like the redemptions here were earned (or at least sympathy successfully generated), and also the whole mid-book thing of (MAJOR SPOILER) "wait, our husbands are both awful, let's team up and use them against each other!" was fucking fantastic and pretty much justified the whole setup, but ymmv.
Final topic: this is a profoundly Jewish novel, and that was awesome. I'm not trying to claim at all that it meant to me what it might mean to a Jewish person, I'm sure some actual Jewish people will write about that, but I found it really cool and really beautiful, in everything from the details of the setting, about what it meant to be Jewish in that medieval context (and what it meant economically for only Jews to be allowed to charge interest), to things like "how do you keep Shabbat in fairyland if you can't tell what time it is", to the (SPOILER) climactic scene with the white fruit and the blessing for trees, which made me cry even though it's not a blessing I recognized or have ever personally said. There was a way in which it felt like the whole novel was leading up to that one line of Hebrew - the way first we get Wanda's outside POV mentioning Miryem's father saying mysterious words over the bread, and then Miryem tells us she sang the prayers for Shabbat, so it's always sort of there, but withheld, which is such a great storytelling trick. And I love that Novik did that, that she said "this, here, is as powerful and magical a thing as anything else in this story". And the way that it was Miryem and her parents, and the whole way Miryem thought about what it meant to her, it felt really right to me. Which, again, my perspective is not a Jewish perspective, but Jewish holidays are definitely what's in the ritual-and-religiosity slot in my own life in whatever side-along way you want to call it.
(I guess I'm a sort of Jewish weeaboo? A Jewaboo? This is a personal tangent but Junie had a surprise "tell us where your family is from and do some art related to that" activity sprung on her at summer camp, and she felt bad because she didn't know how to answer, but the one thing she was able to come up with for her art was a menorah, which I thought was great and Josh, happily, also thought was great. Sometimes it's awkward that I care more about the opportunity for the kids to not be outsiders to Judaism than their actual parent-who-doesn't-call-himself-Jewish-but-was-raised-that-way does; it's so nice when we're both just like "yay our kid". (And then I did sit Junie down and draw her a family tree explaining the nine European countries where we're pretty sure she has ancestors and then she came home with some art featuring the coat of arms of the Ukraine, and I did not say "uhhhh, possibly anybody who used that coat of arms was more like trying to kill your ancestors and also, shit, I think Minsk is actually in Belarus", but, enh, baby steps.) (And I may have started having a ridiculous fantasy of taking her to Curacao to sort of nominally connect with my own (few, distant) Jewish roots...))
Anyways, Spinning Silver! Eeeee!
A general spoiler-free opinion behind this first cut: highly recommended, particularly if you have any interest in fairy tales or in Judaism in sff.
And then, behind this second cut and a bit of space, a longer, spoilery discussion about the book and some aspects of the story:
a
bit
of
space
So this is probably the novel of the year, for me. I know it's only August and I haven't read that many 2018 works yet and there's some good stuff on the horizon so who knows, but this is definitely now the book to beat. I want to recommend it to everyone who reads fantasy, and give a copy to my mom even though she never reads anything I give her (but she would like them if she would), and buy a copy to leave on the bookshelf for Junie to pick up in a few years. And you will definitely be seeing it on my Hugo nominations. It is so beautiful and well-constructed and meaningful and made me cry like three times and is so much a story that I needed right now.
For people who are curious how it relates to the novelette: the novelette story is basically the first part of the book, with two more POVs added for the book, and then some things go in a different direction and break out into the larger plot of the rest of the book. There's definitely an entire novel's worth of story here and I thought she did a good job of retaining the core coolness of the novelette while also going way, way beyond it.
It was so interesting to me how some of the same themes she's been working with in her fanfiction turn up here too - like, this really felt of a piece with her fanfic. (Which, I probably should spell out, is GOOD and meant as PRAISE - she's my favorite fanfic author and I reread her fic all the time and I am more or less constantly on the lookout for any original fiction that's nearly that good. (And most of her stuff for awhile lately is basically original fiction to me anyways, given my lack of canon familiarity.)) Honor and loyalty, duty and responsibility, being the best version of yourself even/especially when that's hard, solidarity... there's some really powerful stuff in Spinning about not just standing by while the fire eats other people's children, even if it keeps yours safe for awhile, which a) is a moral point that can't be made too many times and b) is more or less right in a line with some of her Transformers work, of all things. And there are certain things in the style particularly around the romantic pairings that felt written for the very story-literate fanfic-type audience, to me, the way the reader is expected to pick up on things and fill in some of the relationship blanks with our own genre understanding.
Relatedly, I'll be curious to see whether it bothers anyone this is very much a book in which brave and good young women have to do the work of humanizing their narratively-assigned marital partners into people it's actually possible to have a relationship with. It didn't bother me because it felt like such classic fairy-tale business (freeing one's prince from a curse, etc), and because I *like* the whole dynamic of women being clever/badass/passionate/etc and dudes slowly realizing how excellent they are (Strictly Ballroom *is* my favorite movie), but people who are turned off by redemption/romance arcs for men who initially do not recognize or respect the protagonist's personhood are maybe not going to be thrilled with Novik's choices there. I know some people were bothered by similar things in Uprooted. I felt like the redemptions here were earned (or at least sympathy successfully generated), and also the whole mid-book thing of (MAJOR SPOILER) "wait, our husbands are both awful, let's team up and use them against each other!" was fucking fantastic and pretty much justified the whole setup, but ymmv.
Final topic: this is a profoundly Jewish novel, and that was awesome. I'm not trying to claim at all that it meant to me what it might mean to a Jewish person, I'm sure some actual Jewish people will write about that, but I found it really cool and really beautiful, in everything from the details of the setting, about what it meant to be Jewish in that medieval context (and what it meant economically for only Jews to be allowed to charge interest), to things like "how do you keep Shabbat in fairyland if you can't tell what time it is", to the (SPOILER) climactic scene with the white fruit and the blessing for trees, which made me cry even though it's not a blessing I recognized or have ever personally said. There was a way in which it felt like the whole novel was leading up to that one line of Hebrew - the way first we get Wanda's outside POV mentioning Miryem's father saying mysterious words over the bread, and then Miryem tells us she sang the prayers for Shabbat, so it's always sort of there, but withheld, which is such a great storytelling trick. And I love that Novik did that, that she said "this, here, is as powerful and magical a thing as anything else in this story". And the way that it was Miryem and her parents, and the whole way Miryem thought about what it meant to her, it felt really right to me. Which, again, my perspective is not a Jewish perspective, but Jewish holidays are definitely what's in the ritual-and-religiosity slot in my own life in whatever side-along way you want to call it.
(I guess I'm a sort of Jewish weeaboo? A Jewaboo? This is a personal tangent but Junie had a surprise "tell us where your family is from and do some art related to that" activity sprung on her at summer camp, and she felt bad because she didn't know how to answer, but the one thing she was able to come up with for her art was a menorah, which I thought was great and Josh, happily, also thought was great. Sometimes it's awkward that I care more about the opportunity for the kids to not be outsiders to Judaism than their actual parent-who-doesn't-call-himself-Jewish-but-was-raised-that-way does; it's so nice when we're both just like "yay our kid". (And then I did sit Junie down and draw her a family tree explaining the nine European countries where we're pretty sure she has ancestors and then she came home with some art featuring the coat of arms of the Ukraine, and I did not say "uhhhh, possibly anybody who used that coat of arms was more like trying to kill your ancestors and also, shit, I think Minsk is actually in Belarus", but, enh, baby steps.) (And I may have started having a ridiculous fantasy of taking her to Curacao to sort of nominally connect with my own (few, distant) Jewish roots...))
Anyways, Spinning Silver! Eeeee!
no subject
Date: 2018-09-29 04:24 pm (UTC)Yep.
no subject
Date: 2018-09-29 04:30 pm (UTC)It's a choice i was never going to give a fair shake to largely because of Uprooted, *which i also really liked don't get me wrong*, but i think it's entirely fair to call it straightwashed, and to take the object lesson that Novik is very very interested in complex misunderstood men with poor social skills and i am... not.
no subject
Date: 2018-10-01 01:51 am (UTC)