People living in the Middle Ages, in an environment as harsh as Northern Russia, were intimately acquainted with the weather. My favorite novelists are Patrick O’Brien (the entire Aubrey-Maturin series), Mary Renault (especially The King Must Die, The Bull From the Sea, and Fire from Heaven) and Dorothy Dunnett (The Lymond Chronicles).

She is raised by Marina’s old nursemaid, Dunya, who spends the evenings telling Vasya scary stories about Ivan and the Gray Wolf, the Firebird, and most terrifying of all, Morozko, the demonic king of winter. At the same time, the big bad, the Bear, is about to awake, and there’s no one to protect the people. He may not go back and see the monk again until he is ready to stay, and he must reflect on the decision for a year before he decides for sure.The Bear and the Nightingale was released in early January 2017, [12] followed by the sequel The Girl in the Tower, [13] which was released in December 2017. Special thanks to my Patrons on Patreon for giving me extra support towards my passion for reading and reviewing! Beautiful and terrifying, and with the vibe of every dark fairytale, I cannot recommend this enough.

Morozko tries his best to meet Vasilisa, and while Pyotr is in Moscow, the demon succeeds in entrapping one of her brothers. She paused and fixed a quelling eye upon Alyosha, who was squealing like a bat and bouncing in his mother’s arms.When I said goodbye, I was not so much saying goodbye to these books as to the person I was when I read them. You turn into a part of the story and connect with all those mythological creatures and you actually feel the snowflakes brush your cheeks and you feel your bones shuddering because the cold and demons waiting for you take to the end of the world. Literacy was extremely low, and the few literate people lived in cities and were mostly clergy, concerned with copying Greek religious texts.

At the same time, I understood that putting yourself first, after a lifetime of loving fiercely, of giving until you’re hollow, is nothing short of a courageous act of radical resistance. As a result, there are whispers from others living in the castle that she is either a witch or crazy, so the Grand Prince sees this as a way to get her out of the public eye. Although the writing is beautifully lyrical and the descriptions highly evocative of landscape and mood, critics worry that the main character’s rejection of anything “girl-like” is its own form of sexism, and they tend to point out that the novel’s third act “does not quite deliver on this promise,” as Caitlyn Paxson puts it in her review for Tor. Vasya is faced with the choice of marriage, a convent, or a life in which she’s considered an outsider by her village and her family. Prepare to have your heart ripped out, loaned back to you full of snow and magic, and ripped out some more.

Q: When I read the book The Bear and the Nightingale, the themes and flavor reminded me of the classic “Women Who Run With The Wolves”.