“Will you tell her?” asked the mare.
“Everything?” the demon said. “Of bears and sorcerers, spells made of sapphires and a witch that lost her daughter? No, of course not. I shall tell her as little as possible. And hope that’s enough.”
One of my favorite courses at UNC was one devoted to Russian fairytales; there’s a familiarity and a warmth of a crackling fire in the stories that tried to bite back the cold, and I loved those stories. When I learned that Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale (Del Rey 2017) took those fairytales, in particular that of Morozko (Frost), and breathed life into them through Vasilisa, a young girl with a second sight to see the stories aren’t just stories, I knew it would be something special. And it is. The first of the trilogy, The Bear and the Nightingale is a gorgeously told bit of magic.
Vasilisa’s mother, Marina, lives to see her born, as she had promised, but no more. The child is cared for by her older siblings and Dunya, the nurse who’d raised Marina, but she grows up half-feral, a child of the woods touched by a magic that frightens those in the village. Her father heads to Moscow to find a wife to help make his daughter respectable. The choice is not his, and a political pairing is made. The woman who becomes Vasilisa’s stepmother is a blood relative to Marina, but she has nothing of her strength and courage. Like Vasilisa, she has the second sight. Only she is afraid and tormented by what she sees and seeks comfort in the church. She, along with the new priest, forbids talk and worship of the old gods. Vasilisa watches her friends weaken and fade without the offerings. The horses grow temperamental, the fire grows cold, the people go hungry. Meanwhile, the Bear is gathering strength to break the binds his brother, Frost, had placed him under so many years ago.
Frost has been looking for Vasilisa for years. He’d thought the witch’s bloodlines had ended and was delighted to learn they hadn’t. Bear is also waiting to claim her, but Frost will find her first. Together, they can stop Bear, but at what cost?
Vasilisa is not the snow maiden from the story of Frost; she is not a bird to be kept in a cage, and she will run wild and free on a stallion named Nightingale with the blue-eyed demon by her side.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 