(originally posted 07 October 2017 on trenchkamen.livejournal.com)

The old spirits of Rus are strong in Vasilisa’s far-northern village. It is wild there and civilized society, including the Church, have so far only lightly touched it. A syncretic co-existence of Christian and traditional spirituality endured comfortably for generations until Vasya’s new stepmother—a pious and fearful young woman—and a zealous young priest arrive, coinciding with an impending conflict between two of the powerful old gods.

I received a free copy of this book at Phoenix Comicon this year, in implicit trade for word-of-mouth promotion. Honestly if it were bad or just mediocre I might not bother writing a review. I get a lot of free promotional books that are decent enough but not good or bad enough to make writing a review fun. (And yet I still spend a good portion of my time at PCC lurking around the publisher’s booths hoping for a jackpot.) But, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

This book ticks several of my boxes—solid prose and writing craftsmanship, fairy tales and folklore, wild women who will not be broken to bridle, crunchy historical details. I also admittedly have A Thing for stories wherein the old, folk gods come up against the new, systemized god(s) (99% of the time a clear stand-in for or, in this case, outright Christianity) and those old gods come out on top. Why is a topic worthy of its own novel or, probably more accurately, some sort of psychological study of myself, but there it is—I lay my biases out for consideration. There are several books I like that contain some mixture of these elements that are honestly not very good books, but I still enjoy them. This *is* a good book, and all the better for me, because it also ticks my elitist boxes for Good Books and Good Writing and Good Use of Words Put Together. This is ‘literary’ fantasy in the sense that it is a solid fantasy story but also well-written. The prose is not clumsy as in so many fantasy novels; you have a good storyteller and a good wordsmith, two things that do not always go together. The prose is simple but powerful, relying on short eye-kick descriptions to flesh out an entire mood or setting. It is a short, dense book in that regard, not prone to long-winded expounding so often found in fantasy writing. The brevity gives the story room to breathe, with just enough detail to guide the reader through the atmosphere.

Vasya and her stepmother Anna take the opposing paths a woman with wild magic in her blood can take, at that time, in that society: Vasya desires freedom and power, and Anna rejects her sight (ability to see spirits) as sin and as something terrifying, seeking to disappear into a convent. Neither one wanted to end up married. Anna is the unhappy, broken refraction of Vasya—seeking the anesthetization of a convent and some sort of exorcism to retain the ability to be a good Orthodox woman, she finds herself powerless over her own life circumstances and takes solace in her daughter while lashing out at a step-child who too closely resembles the evil she could become if she allows herself. I found Anna to be a sympathetic characterization of the Evil Stepmother, who, more often than not, was a victim of circumstance and resigned to the lot of women in those days, which was to be broodmare and housekeeper. It’s a bit played in a very 90’s-afterschool-special sort of way to say that people bully others because they are jealous and insecure, but I do think that is the case, here, deep down, beneath the pious disgust at Vasya’s wildness and the fear of the good Christian encountering pagan forces. Her lot is an unhappy one and she is too weak to change it, while Vasya has power, something few women had. But, it is not that Anna is exceptionally weak so much that Vasya is exceptionally strong, in refusing her own fate—this is an era when women are chattel and treated as eternal children insofar as the law is concerned. Even Vasya’s ability to escape her ‘women’s lot’ relies in great deal upon her supernatural abilities and the favor she wins with the frost king. But, as Anna shows us, innate power alone will not free you—you have to do it yourself. Vasya’s courage and initiative are shown to be all the more exceptional, and ultimately what frees her, because Anna is there to serve as a foil.

The book is by no means flawless (none are; why I bother even mentioning this has something to do with my insecurities around looking like a sycophant) but there aren’t any truly systemic flaws I can catch. The pacing stumbles toward the end and the story feels truncated; I get the feeling either that it was not intended for a series, as almost all fantasy novels now must be for marketing, or that it was originally a much longer story later re-cut into separate books, with the hiccups in pacing and requisite need for a winding-down and ramping-up at the joins that would be required. The ending feels rushed and, although it ends with a very fairy-tale-appropriate power-of-sacrifice demonstration, feels almost like a cop-out in comparison to the sense of proportion and limitations on the infinite power of magic throughout the rest of the story. I get the feeling the author was trying to differentiate the liminal space in which the final battle occurs from the realm of the mortals, but instead of infusing this reader with a sense of awe at the difference, it felt disjointed. But that is almost beyond the point: the narrative core of the story is Vasya’s handling of her magical destiny and abilities, in that she refuses to follow the path a fairy tale heroine should follow (which is still one of courage and industry) in lieu of her own. Given that she grew up hearing fairy stories this would be on some level a conscious rejection—she would know she should be rewarded for her courage at the end of things, no strings attached, with the things a proper girl would aspire to, but still refuses them, even though there would be no (few?) pre-existing narratives she would know that told her this was an option. We contemporary women take these stories for granted and forget more often than not how truly exceptional these defiant decisions were for women of the past.
This book has pores, as Professor Faber would put it; it is a vital, living document, that works as an organic whole despite its flaws. The hand of a human author is heavy on it. It works for what it is. That is all any story can do; if you have problems with what it is, you have problems with something beyond execution, and all any semi-objective book review that will be of any use to anybody else can critique is execution.

I am looking forward to the next installment. Apparently Vasilisa disguises herself as a man and goes off on grand adventures around Rus to right wrongs, which ticks several more of my Boxes, a big one being women who disguise themselves as men to get shit done when they live in a society where women are not allowed to live as fully autonomous and rational beings.  Which should shock no one who knows me. I also have A Thing for women who refuse any hints or offerings that they’ve done enough, proven themselves brave enough to get some halfway-concession to living within a woman’s restraints, and choose to continue to live free instead of take the dubious ‘rewards’ of husband and hearth, even a very wealthy husband who likes her high-spiritedness and a very nice hearth.