![]() ![]() ![]() Spinning Silver begins in a vaguely Eastern European village in which Miryem’s father is the local moneylender, kind but far too softhearted to make much headway collecting payments that are owed to him (though the risk of inflaming the always hazardous anti-Semitism of the locals may play a role as well). On the one hand, it’s literally a song of ice and fire on the other, it’s basically the story of two really bad marriages. ![]() Part of the fascination in reading the novel comes from the skillful manner in which Novik gradually modulates and expands the scope of her tale from its modest beginnings (essentially that original story) into a full-blown epic, without losing sight of the economic and social realities that ground it in human terms. Now Novik has expanded Spinning Silver into an ambitious novel that evokes not only the original fairy tale, but a whole panoply of fantasy spectacles ranging from elemental nature spirits to hints of Disney movies like Frozen or Moana (with one of those lava monsters that have also become ubiquitous in games and films like Wrath of the Titans). One of the highlights of Navah Wolfe & Dominic Parisien’s The Starlit Wood a couple of years ago was Naomi Novik’s “Spinning Silver”, a shrewd deconstruction of the Rumpelstiltskin tale, which highlighted, among other things, the anti-Semitic undertones of the original, a point which Jane Yolen and others have previously noted. ![]()
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