“So the fairy silver brought you a monster of fire for a husband, and me a monster of ice. We should put them in a room together and let them make us both widows.”
Naomi Novik’s Hugo-nominated novel is a Russian-themed fairy tale that starts with three women: a moneylender, a poor farmer’s daughter, and the daughter of a duke. It also starts with the seeds of some familiar tales, and turns into an achingly beautiful saga of treasure, love, and the hidden perils and rewards of putting yourself in someone’s debt, whether to a person, a family, or a kingdom.
The greedy moneylender is a pretty standard character in older stories, made worse when it’s specifically a Jewish moneylender, as Miryem’s father is. (Hey, quick question, do you know why being a moneylender was tied with being a Jew? Because people needed a way to borrow money for a large expense or to survive on until harvest time, Jews were pushed out of most other ways of making a living in a Christian society, and Christians couldn’t be moneylenders because lending with interest could get you excommunicated. My how times have changed…)
Josef, Miryem’s father, is a terrible moneylender…by which I mean he’s endlessly patient, generous, far too kindhearted, and very aware that Jews often have the choice of being hated for the money they’re owed, or despised for not being strong enough to demand the money back.
Miryem finally decides she’s had enough of the townspeople feasting off of borrowed money they insist they can’t pay back while her own family starves, so she takes over the job of moneylender for her family. And she’s good at it. Really good. She collects what the townspeople owe in copper coins, or goods that she can trade for more copper which she can exchange for silver, and eventually for gold. She even bullies the drunk farmer Gorek into sending his daughter, Wanda, to work for Miryem’s family to pay off his debt. Everything’s looking up, so it’s understandable that she would snap at her mother for grieving at how cold and ruthless Miryem’s had to become.
Unfortunately one of the terrifying fairyfolk known as the Staryk happens to hear Miryem’s boast about how she can “turn silver into gold”. You can probably guess where this is going next…“
How far would we have to go to run from winter?
Miryem’s desperate plan to turn faerie silver into gold gives the local Duke an idea on how his plain daughter Irina can catch the eye of the handsome, unmarried Tsar. And young Wanda has a plan for how she can use the money Miryem is paying her to get herself free from her abusive father.
Here’s the thing though. Miryem, Irina, and Wanda all reach the point where most fairy tales would stop, maybe even with a happily-ever-after. But the book is only a quarter of the way though, everyone’s situation has gotten a lot more complicated, and now the story really gets going.
“I’m not a fool, to take gifts from monsters,” I said. “Where do you think its power comes from? Nothing like that comes without a price.”
He laughed, a little shrill and sharp. “Yes, the trick is to have someone else pay it for you…”
More viewpoints are added every few chapters, with the story branching out like a tree. Every character has a fascinating history, and every character kept surprising me. Constantly. Delightfully. One person would be shockingly vicious one moment, and then there would be an instance of kindness that was equally shocking from someone else. There were times that I’d be cheering when someone did exactly what I was hoping, but never expecting, even though the author had set everything in motion pages earlier.
The characters of Wanda, Miryem, and Irina are the most surprising of all. All of them live in a world where women were treated as nothing more than prizes or bargaining chips. Even they don’t think they’re up to the impossible tasks they’re given (and oh boy, does Miryem ever have a nightmarishly, impossible task. Think Rumplestiltskin, but with the possibility of more death). And then they go ahead and charge forward anyway; Irina playing a cat-and-mouse game with the handsome and terrifying tsar, timid farmgirl Wanda taking on monsters and faeries and her own father, and Miryem herself going toe-to-toe with the lord of the Staryk, practically spitting in his face with an impressive amount of fire, turning his own rules against him and using the weirdest kind of leverage I’ve seen in a fairy tale.
Not that being strong (or at the very least stubborn as hell) means smooth sailing for any of them; they repeatedly have to make hard decisions when all of the options are bad.
But it was all the same choice, every time. The choice between the one death and all the little ones.
Novik keeps coming back to the concept of treasure, either turning copper to silver to gold, or the painstaking task of gathering food and firewood and shelter, or turning wool to yarn to a blanket knitted with a pattern of vines and flowers. And tied into all that treasure is the element of debt, of owing something to someone, even if that person never expected to be paid back. It’s hard to figure out which causes more problems here: the people who refuse to repay their debts, the debts that are impossible to pay, or the people who won’t offer or accept even the tiniest bit of help until it’s been practically spelled out in letters a mile high exactly how much that help is worth.
But most of all, this book is a pure fairy tale. There are all the familiar tropes: hidden names, three questions (and three only), mirrors becoming portals to another world, and magical houses in the forest. There are demons of fire and lords of ice. There are rules that can’t be broken but can be bent if you can figure out just the right way. There are laugh-out-loud moments like the Tsar being irritated with bad poetry. There are moments of sacrifice and love. And there are all the lovely images the author creates, like pictures painted in a children’s book: the court of the Tsar and the court inside a mountain of ice, a Jewish wedding under an impossible night sky, a snow-covered forest and a giant deer with crystals hanging from its antlers.
The best fairytales end with one last note, a literary smile from the storyteller as they close the book. The author manages it here with a perfect final line, like a gold coin dropped into the reader’s hand.
Cover illustration by my new favorite artist, Nicolas Delort.