Spinning Silver

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, 466 pages

Once upon a time, a young woman took over her father's faltering money-lending business, and turned out to be much better at the business than him. One day in the forest, the young woman exclaimed that she could turn silver into gold (metaphorically speaking, of course), but an evil king of winter overheard her and kidnapped her on the basis of her alchemical powers.

Once upon a time, the quiet daughter of a duke spent her days in the upper rooms of a castle, awaiting the day that her father and stepmother would marry her off to some distant lord for some political advantage or another. One day, a jeweler came to the duke and sold him some powerful silver jewelry, which the duke used to make a match between the quiet girl and the diabolical tsar.

Both of these stories come together in Novik's Spinning Silver, a fairytale that weaves together Jewish tradition, Eastern European mythology, and more than a bit of feminism through two excellent central characters in Miryem (the moneylender) and Irina (the duke's daughter). I loved the story told here, though Novik's use of shifting first-person perspectives would've been easier to handle had she labeled the sections. But that's a minor quibble with an otherwise wonderful book.