Book Review: Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik

(Caveat: I read this a couple months back, so some of the details are going to be woefully wrong—like I can’t remember for sure if the rulers are tsars, but I think they are.)

Rating: 4.5 stars, maybe 5

Clean rating: 

PG-13, largely for thematic elements (it’s a harsh sort of life, there are demons and other evil beings, there’s a forced marriage in which the woman worries quite a bit over where the sex life is going to go, etc.). I didn’t find it unreasonable or gratuitous.

Overview: 

This book is an awesome, complex tale loosely based on Rumpelstiltskin, with nods to a number of other fairy tales (I caught Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, a couple others that seemed like maybes). It’s set in an Eastern European feeling world.

The story follows three women in very different situations, starting first with Miryem, the daughter of a Jewish moneylender, dealing with a lot of the real prejudices a Jewish moneylender would have faced in this kind of a world. Next is Wanda, a poor daughter of an abusive and drunken father. Finally is Irina, a rich noble who, despite her better economic situation, has very little control over her life, just like the others. Their stories start separate but interweave until they all work together.

What I liked:

This story was exactly my cup of tea. The characters are highly flawed in a lot of ways, including being sometimes downright unlikable—but they’re all in untenable situations and doing the best they can. I loved the writing. I loved the nods to fairy tales but how much richness was added to the narrative beyond the basics of a fairy tale. I liked the worldbuilding with strange fae-like characters (called the Staryk) whose motivations seem incomprehensible but maybe aren’t really, once you get down to the details. 

Plus, no spoiler here, but I thought the very ending (we're talking about the last couple paragraphs) was spot-on perfect. Love love loved it. I think the story may have earned an extra half a star from me for that alone. It’s certainly what left me smiling goofily and telling my husband all about it after I finished.

What I didn’t like:

I’m sure there was something here, but it fades. I don’t really think the story was perfect, but I enjoyed so much and felt like it all came together—even the things I didn’t like about it as I was reading it came together in a way that I felt satisfied with. I will say that as I was going, I was not convinced the author would resolve the romantic storylines in ways I felt good about, given that so many of the characters were selfish, incomprehensible, or sometimes downright evil. And I’m sure that those resolutions didn’t work for many readers—but for me, they did.

Other notes: 

In looking at other people’s reviews of the book, I began to consider the POV issue. This book is written from three main POV characters, but then there are another 2-4 minor POV characters thrown in as well. I didn’t have a difficult time figuring out who was speaking, though some readers complained about that. But I do think some of the POVs seemed unnecessary, and I didn’t love having them jump in just when I’d gotten used to how many POV characters we had. So if you have difficulties with multiple narrators, this is likely to be distracting and unpleasant to you. 

Final thoughts:

I enjoyed it. I know not everyone did, but I thought it was a wonderful book and if the POV thing and some sometimes-unlikable characters don’t throw you off, and if you love fairy tale retellings, you should read it. The end.

"Forged in Iron and Blood," out today!

I’m so pleased to finally be able to share “Forged in Iron and Blood.” It has been embarrassingly long in the works (like, most authors spend less time on full-length novels than I spent on this one), but I’m immensely happy with how it turned out,* and I hope you enjoy it! You can order it, along with a bunch of other great stories, here.

I figured that, now that this story is out in the world, I’d share a few bits and pieces about how it came about. No spoilers here.

A couple years ago (seriously), I saw an open call for short story submissions that really struck my fancy (I can’t remember it exactly, but it was something about iron and oak, I think—tales of the fae), and I started mulling over it. My husband and I were just about to leave for Italy for an anniversary vacation, and I remember standing in line to board our first plane (before we were so massively jetlagged that we could hardly string together complete sentences)** and explaining the theme to him and starting to brainstorm. At that point, if I recall, I had about one idea—I wanted an awesome older woman in my story.

Brice (the husband) is my most fantastic brainstorming partner. I bounce all my best ideas off him, and they get better. There are also about a million zany ideas that I immediately discard (he usually brings up dinosaurs or explosions at some point, or weird stuff like talking goats and such). But it’s so much fun that I don’t mind. 

By the end of our first brainstorming session, we had a character named Lina, who was a retired soldier, and she had an awesome berserker fairy friend, and there was going to be a kind of Wild West shootout sort of thing.

I took the ideas and ran away from that plotline, but I saved a few of my favorite parts (including bits of the early description of her berserker friend), and I came up with an ending that I was soooo excited about, and I wrote that. And then I stalled out. (I have an embarrassing number of stories that have an awesome beginning and ending written, with absolutely no way to get from one to the other.)

So it sat around for a while, while I worked on some stories inspired by our Italy trip (those are still drafting—one is a novel, one is a short, a couple are totally dead in the water) and the deadline for the submission call went whooshing by. And I finally wrote it and workshopped it and was still stuck on a couple of little elements. So I kept putting it off to work on other stuff. And/or avoid working on other stuff.

Finally, in August of this year, I had an awesome experience that kicked me back into gear. As you may know, I’m a slush reader for Deep Magic.*** Our fantastic board members (Jeff Wheeler and Charlie Holmberg in this case) occasionally offer us various opportunities to learn from them, and they gave us the chance to submit a first page to them for critique. I submitted the first page of “Forged in Iron and Blood.”

To make a long story short, Jeff especially liked it, and I made a commitment to submit it by the end of the current submission period. Now I had a deadline! And suddenly, just like that, I got back to work (I know there are these magical people who work better when they’re not on deadline, but I’m not one of them). There was more drafting, more critique, and an amazing editing cut by my husband. I was trying to drop the dross from 9000 words and struggling over a couple hundred. Brice got hold of it and somehow managed to delete about 3500 without even breaking a sweat! I ignored about a third of his changes and smooched him for the rest—he made the story so much clearer and lovelier—and it was ready to submit!

And that’s the story! One final note, though: The day I got my acceptance letter had been a bad day. I don’t even remember why, but it was blech. When I saw the email come in, the little preview of it on my phone made me think it was going to be a rejection—yuck. So then when I opened it and got the acceptance, I had to do a little happy dance. It definitely helped make the rest of the day a lot better.

If you read the story, I hope you enjoy it. If you haven’t bought it yet, you should! ;) It’s only $3 for my story and a whole bunch more! You know you want to.

* Except that one sentence that I just today realized how I would have liked to rewrite it! Sigh. The life of a writer—nothing is truly done, you just have to let it go.

** Little did I know how much worse jetlag could be, traveling with small, sick children literally to the other side of the planet—13.5-hour jetlag is crazy talk.

*** This means I get to read through tons of submissions that come in to the magazine, and I pass the stories that best suit Deep Magic up to other readers—it’s an awesome opportunity, and I’ll have to write about it more sometime!

How NOT to Write a Short Story

Step 1. Have a short story idea for a submission call. Two years ago. It has one POV character and is, loosely, a romance.

Step 2. Start to brainstorm it. Run it by an agent, just for funsies, because you already paid for a pitch session and have nothing else to talk about.

Step 3. Hear these fateful words: “It sounds like a novel.” (Cue ominous music.)

Step 4. Yeah, it does sound like a novel. This would be pretty great.

Step 5. But it needs two POV characters.

Step 6. And an antagonist, obviously, who’s pretty awful. But he doesn’t need a POV.

Step 7. Enter the very important sister with a very detailed backstory—enough for her own short story at least.

Step 8. That villain is getting pretty loud. Definitely need to do some scenes from his POV.

Step 9. Some first chapter contests, some workhops.

Step 10. One round of NaNoWriMo (but only 30k words, because you’re working on other stuff at the same time).

Step 11. More brainstorming, more outlining. Because finally you’re really seriously going to finish up this story idea. No more sidetracks.

Step 12. Wait, what? That new character idea would really be super intriguing. She totally deserves her own sequel. But for now, she’ll just show up as a hint at the very end. Right?

Step 13. Wrong. She’s totally a POV character. Maybe?

Step 14. But at least I don’t have to write the sister’s POV! (Yet.)

And that, my friends, is how a 7k-word story idea I had a couple years ago has blossomed into today’s NaNoWriMo project, projected to end up probably somewhere around 80­-90k, with four POV characters.

Podcastle Semifinalist, NYC Midnight Flash Fiction

Fun news! A story I submitted to Podcastle’s flash fiction contest (500 words or less) is now a semifinalist! The competition has gone from about 215 stories down to 51.

I finished a decent draft of this piece in March-ish at ~900 words, but it needed some tightening. So the challenge to drop down to 500 was the perfect boost to get cutting. The competition is strictly anonymous, so I won’t talk more about the piece itself, but I may post later, after names have been revealed.

If you are a SFF reader who loves very short fic, you’re welcome to read and participate in the voting. The forum where they hold the contest is currently down, unfortunately. They had some tech bugs at a very good-and-bad time. Good because they’d just finished up the first round of voting. Bad because those of us in the semifinals are now holding our breath. All my sympathies to their “tech barbarians” for having to get this sorted. When the forum is up again, I’ll share a link to show you how you can get involved.

As I mentioned, the competition is very anonymous, so please, if you are among the few who know which piece is mine, don’t vote in my semifinalist group! And obviously don’t say, “Oh, hey! This is Jeanna’s story!” Or do anything else nefarious, like creating multiple accounts at a single household, etc.—I really don’t want to succeed by cheating. (And I am up against some really fantastic stories, as well as a few I don’t particularly care for—but there are enough wonderful ones that it’s going to be hard.)

In other news, I’ll be doing NYC Midnight’s flash fiction contest again this year. It’s going to be weird doing it from an Australia time zone rather than New York’s. I’ll write for half a day on Saturday, take a break for Sunday, and finish my piece on Monday morning, so that’s a bit different.

In honor of preparing for this contest, and to dust off my rusty writing skills, I’m requesting some prompts! So if you’re still reading this post, I’d love to have you comment with the following: a genre, a location, and an object. Be as random as you want. Then I’ll pick a couple of these and write some flash fiction! If I choose your prompts, I’ll also send you my story to read (it may be great or it may be trash—it’s like a grab bag from the dollar store, where you have no idea what you’re going to get!).

That’s it for now! Thanks for reading.