Charlotte Kersten

“But the world I wanted wasn’t the world I lived in, and if I would do nothing until I could repair every terrible thing at once, I would do nothing forever.”

Year published: 2018

Categories: Adult, fantasy, retelling (Rumpelstiltskin)

Summary: Miryem is the daughter and granddaughter of moneylenders, but her father’s inability to collect his debts has left his family on the edge of poverty–until Miryem takes matters into her own hands. Hardening her heart, the young woman sets out to claim what is owed and soon gains a reputation for being able to turn silver into gold.

When an ill-advised boast draws the attention of the king of the Staryk–grim fey creatures who seem more ice than flesh–Miryem’s fate, and that of two kingdoms, will be forever altered. Set an impossible challenge by the nameless king, Miryem unwittingly spins a web that draws in a peasant girl, Wanda, and the unhappy daughter of a local lord who plots to wed his child to the dashing young tsar.

But Tsar Mirnatius is not what he seems. And the secret he hides threatens to consume the lands of humans and Staryk alike. Torn between deadly choices, Miryem and her two unlikely allies embark on a desperate quest that will take them to the limits of sacrifice, power, and love.

Channeling the vibrant heart of myth and fairy tale, Spinning Silver weaves a multilayered, magical tapestry that readers will want to return to again and again. 

My Thoughts: There’s nothing that makes me quite as happy as a lush, beautiful fairy tale re-telling, and Spinning Silver now joins Heart’s Blood and Deerskin as one of my favorites of all time. To me, a perfect re-telling does the following things: sheds new light upon or offers a clever new interpretation of the story’s traditional elements, provides its characters with the kind of multidimensionality that is often absent in the original fable, and suffuses the entire thing with a sense of beauty, magic and wonder. Since I adored Spinning Silver, you won’t be surprised to hear that I think it succeeds spectacularly on all three counts. It’s masterfully woven and elegantly told, and its story lines and perspectives intersect and mirror each other in the most delightful of ways. I think its greatest strength, however, lies in the brilliant ways that identity, agency and community are treated within the three main perspectives.

Miryem’s story is one of her fierce determination and her ability to harden her heart to the world in order to take care of the people she loves. While in truth she is keeping her family from being taken advantage of, this is an act that requires a great deal of strength and bravery because of the way that Jewish moneylenders are hated by the people in her community. The antisemitism that she and her family experience is deftly handled as they struggle to find a balance between making a living for themselves, effectively running a business, showing compassion to others and engaging in the kind of practicality and self-advocacy that will inevitably see them vilified by the people they lend money to.

“So the people said the Jews had made a pact with the Staryk. And now there are no Jews in Yazuda. Do you understand, Miryem? You will not speak of the Staryk coming to our house.”

The exploration of antisemitism is a important element of the story, and I particularly appreciate its incorporation because of the unfortunate fact of the antisemitism that was rife in traditional fairy tales, where the horrible stereotype of the evil, rapacious Jew featured multiple times. When I was reading about this subject while writing my review, I also came across this journal article, which discusses the way that Jewish authors such as Naomi Novik and Jane Yolen are able to “destabilize the dominant paradigm of the Grimm’s fairy tales by demonstrating its cultural specificity” and use the “impetus of exclusion to fashion a response that casts the genre itself in a new light.” Another thing that I think is extremely important is that Novik does not only focus on the experience of persecution, but also shows the amazing side of Jewish identity by demonstrating the incredible love that ties Miryam’s family together – their strength, compassion, joy and connectedness.

This side of the story is important not just for Miryem but also for Wanda, the book’s second narrator. Her story is one of transitioning from mere desperate survival to finding love and trust and safety after living with a violently abusive father for most of her life. Though I loved all three perspectives, I think ultimately Wanda’s story was my favorite of the three. There are so many incredibly beautiful moments as she comes to love Miryam’s family and be loved by them in return. The bleak resentment that she originally feels towards her brothers as burdens gradually blossoms into a fierce protectiveness when they are no longer divided by their father’s hate and terrorism and are given the space to do something other than scrounge for survival. Ultimately they all refuse to be divided and separated by fear any longer, and they refuse to perpetuate the pattern of cruelty that they have been taught:

“And then I thought, if anyone came to the house at all—if anyone came to the house who was hungry and in trouble—we would let them stay. There would be food in our house for them, and we would be glad.”

The third main narrator is Irina, an unassuming young noble who is shocked to be married to the tsar of the land, even more shocked to discover that he is host to a ravenous demon, and most shocked of all to find that she has her own magic that can fight against the demon’s pursuit. Miryem and Irina’s stories share the most intersections and overlap as they spend the most time in the Staryk’s land at different period of time and are both paired off with villainous men who are, ultimately, revealed to be not so villainous after all. The tsar, Marnatius, ends up being quite a pitiable figure, and I will forever laugh at the scene where Irina decides to bounce their bed while he sobs in order to convince anyone overhearing that, well, something else is going on.

Although the Staryk is ultimately revealed to be engaging in all of his violent, cruel behavior in order to protect his people from the Chernobog, I am still the least convinced of his redemption, and even less pleased with the ultimate romance between him and Miryem. She “proves” herself to him by spinning silver and he comes to respect her, but to me all that says is that he would still treat an “unworthy” person with violence and cruelty – and that Miryem just happens to no longer fall into the category of an “unworthy” person to him.

This is my only complaint in what is otherwise pretty much a perfect book to me. It’s a story of female autonomy and agency – Miryem standing up for her family and surviving in the Staryk’s strange world, Wanda overcoming her fear and the cruelty of her past to connect with her brothers and create a better future for them and Irina fighting the demon and coming into her own as a ruler who will do what is best for her people. All three of them begin their stories being entrapped in unwanted deals with men and consequently find autonomy and agency by fighting for themselves and the people they care about. They find strength in each other as their stories intertwine. Ultimately, this is a story of what we owe each other – through debts and deals, through gratitude and compassion, through our yearning for love and safety.; it is a story of what we will do to help others and keep them safe:

“There are men who are wolves inside, and want to eat up other people to fill their bellies. That is what was in your house with you, all your life. But here you are with your brothers, and you are not eaten up, and there is not a wolf inside you. You have fed each other, and you kept the wolf away. That is all we can do for each other in the world, to keep the wolf away.”