Some of the magic in this book is magic, and some is good bookkeeping, which is also magic, and that’s wonderful, that appreciation of the magic of letters and numbers, the magic of negotiation, the magic of noticing. Her tone can move from gently humorous, to sweepingly epic, to piercingly sad easily, and back again.Īnd her world is focused on women, in a society which is not kind to them, on the ways that women can defend themselves, become themselves, and interact with the various forms of magic. Her Russia is a hard place, and awareness of the crops and of how close starvation is lends her narrative urgency and realism.
Novik’s characters are compelling, and the moral choices they are faced with are genuinely difficult. This book is an act of reclamation on a very deep level. Rumpelstiltskin has been used to reinforce the blood libel.
I have researched the subject before, and this may well be the first book of its kind: there is staggeringly little Jewish fantasy, compared to the number of Jewish people who work and write in the field.Īnd doing this with a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin is a stroke of genius, because that story has often been associated with the stereotypical view of Jews in medieval Europe, as child-stealers. It is a book in which Judaism is the substrate the same way that Christianity is the (mostly unexamined) substrate of so many other fantasy novels. This is not a book about pogroms, or the Holocaust it is aware of religious persecution, but that is not its subject. This is a fantasy novel in which people plan around the time of Shabbat. This is Jewish high fantasy, in which Jewish characters have interiority and agency, and some are more religious than others, and the Torah and its lessons inform how people think and react. The novel widens its scope beyond the original fairytale, eventually including the destiny of two kingdoms, a haunted tsar, a sorcerous winter, and elements from ‘‘Cinderella’’, among other stories, but the most important way it widens its scope is that Miryem and her family are explicitly Jewish. The King of the Staryk, the magical and dangerous elves who sometimes hunt humans for gold, hears her mention this talent, and decides to test it.
Instead of spinning straw into gold, she can spin silver coins into gold, if she has time to take them through the marketplace, first. Instead of a miller’s daughter, the protagonist, Miryem, is a moneylender’s daughter. Naomi Novik follows Uprooted with a brilliant retelling of Rumpelstiltskin set in a medieval pseudo-Russia.
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