The Bear and the Nightingale<\/i> is what I think of as fairy-tale fantasy, like Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver<\/i>. This one is based on Russian folk tales, in particular the one about the poor stepdaughter who sent out into the woods in the middle of the winter and told to bring back snowdrops (or violets, or strawberries, or other variations).<\/p>\n
Vasya is the youngest child of a wealthy boyar somewhere in the North of Russia in medieval times. Her grandmother was known\/rumoured to be a magical princess. Vasya’s mother died giving birth to her, and tasked her father with watching over her because she knew the girl would inherit her grandmother’s gifts and would have something important to do.<\/p>\n
As the girl grows up, people notice her talking to thin air. When she tells them of the spirits she speaks to, and grows ever wilder and more unpredictable, the family convinces her father that the girl needs a mother. He remarries, bringing home another high-born lady, rumoured to be mad. When she arrives at the manor, it turns out the woman wasn’t mad but instead saw spirits just like Vasya. <\/p>\n
The story is full of spirits. The hairy, bearded house spirit, and the toad-like lake spirit, the forest spirit and all the others. While only Vasya and her stepmother can see them, being friendly to them is part of normal life. Even the women who don’t see them, leave offerings to the domovoi<\/i>.<\/p>\n
But the stepmother forbids Vasya to ever mention the spirits or give them offerings, and invites a priest to the household to drive the creatures away. Vasya’s second sight and the creatures may be the only thing standing between the village and disaster, but the priest is determined to drive them all out.<\/p>\n
I really enjoyed the Russian flavour of this book. I could relate to it much more personally than to standard Western European fantasy. Western European fairy tales and fantasies with sword-bearing knights and impressive castles have always felt distant, like the stories would only ever happen in some other world. But the Russian environment, with birch forests and muddy lakes, log farmhouses, and wooden forts instead of grand stone castles, is all like old Estonia. Mostly gone now, but I’ve seen enough of it to make it feel real. And extended families living on a large farm, with grandma sleeping on the masonry stove<\/a>, all that is relatable.<\/p>\n Many times I noticed the author using an expression which I sounds archaic, even a bit overdone, in English but immediately felt less so when I mentally translated it into Estonian. Estonian is not at all related to Russian linguistically but has centuries of close cultural ties and has borrowed a lot of idioms over time. Likewise the names, probably exotic to most English-language readers, are familiar and homey to me, after all the Russian tales and books I’ve read and heard. <\/p>\n The storytelling in this book is slow, but in a good way. It’s magical, beautiful and sharp.<\/p>\n I also liked the balance that the author found. Despite appearances, this is not a story about organized religion vs traditional beliefs. Most of the people in the book see no contradiction between them, just like it was in real life. Folk beliefs survived for hundreds of years after Christianity arrived in Estonia. And Vasya’s own tale is not about rebellion vs obedience. The two can coexist. Vasya may refuse to accept a woman’s traditional lot, but doesn’t put herself above the other women who do, or think herself a hero. She also serves, in her own way.<\/p>\n The book is apparently a part of a trilogy, but worked very well on its own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Bear and the Nightingale is what I think of as fairy-tale fantasy, like Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver. This one is based on Russian folk tales, in particular the one about the poor stepdaughter who sent out into the woods in the middle of the winter and told to bring back snowdrops (or violets, or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12146"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12151,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12146\/revisions\/12151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}