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Jun. 5th, 2019 10:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsRena Rossner's The Sisters of the Winter Wood is chock full of extremely delicious ingredients:
- sisters!
- in the turn-of-the-century Pale of Settlement!
- with a devout Hasidic father
- who is also a WEREBEAR from a clan of HASIDIC BEAR RABBINICAL ROYALTY
- that may want to kidnap a bear daughter for an arranged bear marriage
- and a Russian convert mother
- who is also a WERESWAN from a clan of RUSSIAN SWAN ACTUAL ROYALTY
- that may want to kidnap a swan daughter for an arranged swan marriage
- ALSO it's a Goblin Market story with sinister fruit-sellers who are trying to seduce swan daughter Laya
- who are entirely unrelated to the bear royalty OR the swan royalty
- also there's a nice but tragically non-ursine Jewish boy with a crush on bear daughter Liba
- also local villagers keep disappearing in suspicious circumstances
- again entirely unrelated to the bear royalty or the swan royalty
- also murder and pogroms?
And all these are amazing plot elements, but it's also QUITE A LOT to juggle, and I'm not sure this book quite manages to balance them in a satisfying fashion? Please, I understand Luba is conflicted about her technically-sort-of-kind-of-forbidden romance but I would actually like a little more time to talk about Hasidic werebear rabbinical royalty!
(It didn't help that while Liba's chapters were written in reasonable albeit constantly identity-crisis-laden prose, Laya's chapters were written in a form of prose poetry that I did not get on with at all, which made it significantly harder for me to track what was going on with her. I'm still not entirely sure how she escaped the goblins, and I read the book two days ago.)
All that said, I'm generally supportive of this kind of kitchen-sink plotting energy, even if the execution didn't fully come together for me, and would super love to see more Jewish fantasy in this vein. Werebears and wereswans galore!
- sisters!
- in the turn-of-the-century Pale of Settlement!
- with a devout Hasidic father
- who is also a WEREBEAR from a clan of HASIDIC BEAR RABBINICAL ROYALTY
- that may want to kidnap a bear daughter for an arranged bear marriage
- and a Russian convert mother
- who is also a WERESWAN from a clan of RUSSIAN SWAN ACTUAL ROYALTY
- that may want to kidnap a swan daughter for an arranged swan marriage
- ALSO it's a Goblin Market story with sinister fruit-sellers who are trying to seduce swan daughter Laya
- who are entirely unrelated to the bear royalty OR the swan royalty
- also there's a nice but tragically non-ursine Jewish boy with a crush on bear daughter Liba
- also local villagers keep disappearing in suspicious circumstances
- again entirely unrelated to the bear royalty or the swan royalty
- also murder and pogroms?
And all these are amazing plot elements, but it's also QUITE A LOT to juggle, and I'm not sure this book quite manages to balance them in a satisfying fashion? Please, I understand Luba is conflicted about her technically-sort-of-kind-of-forbidden romance but I would actually like a little more time to talk about Hasidic werebear rabbinical royalty!
(It didn't help that while Liba's chapters were written in reasonable albeit constantly identity-crisis-laden prose, Laya's chapters were written in a form of prose poetry that I did not get on with at all, which made it significantly harder for me to track what was going on with her. I'm still not entirely sure how she escaped the goblins, and I read the book two days ago.)
All that said, I'm generally supportive of this kind of kitchen-sink plotting energy, even if the execution didn't fully come together for me, and would super love to see more Jewish fantasy in this vein. Werebears and wereswans galore!
