skygiants | (no subject)

Rena 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!

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

sovay

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!

SERIOUSLY.

(For once, this icon is almost appropriate.)

[edit] I also really want to know how Luba and Laya's parents got together.

Edited Date: 2019-06-06 03:20 am (UTC)

From:

kore

ALSO it's a Goblin Market story with sinister fruit-sellers who are trying to seduce swan daughter Laya

I was actually swooning by this point

ETA FIVE BUCKS? //snatches up

Edited Date: 2019-06-06 03:24 am (UTC)

From:

skygiants

I can't believe that when listing plot points I forgot to even MENTION the FEUD between the were-swans and the were-bears as a result of all the dramatic circumstances and subsequent fallout of Luba and Laya's parents getting together!

From:

skygiants

Rena Rossner spends some time in the afterward listing all of the influences that went into the book and my nods just got MORE AND MORE EMPHATIC as the list went on!

From:

genarti

I'm sorry that it sounds like this book didn't quite come together as a coherent whole, because this bullet-point list of elements is A MA ZING

From:

kore

I am now in the position of the donkey who has like five or six totally munchable bales of hay on her Kindle //sobs

From:

rachelmanija

The story sounds fantastic but I am very dubious about prose poetry.

From:

genarti

Now I'm just waiting to see how many other zany plot points which in almost any other book would be EXTREMELY MEMORABLE emerge as I-forgot-to-mentions in the comments here.

From:

sholio

It's too bad the book didn't quite live up to the promise, but that sounds like one hell of a plot. :D

From:

vass

I would actually like a little more time to talk about Hasidic werebear rabbinical royalty!

YES PLEASE.

*very softly utters the words "off the bear-ech"*

From:

sovay

From:

sovay

*very softly utters the words "off the bear-ech"*

+++++++++++++++++1.

From:

seekingferret

The prose-poetry didn't really work for me, as poetry, but it worked well enough for me as a distinguishment between Laya's voice and Liba's voice.

From:

osprey_archer

who is also a WEREBEAR from a clan of HASIDIC BEAR RABBINICAL ROYALTY

OMG. So disappointed to hear that the book focuses more on the sort-of-kind-forbidden romance (it's not even really forbidden? weaksauce) when we could having frickin' lineages and stuff. I ABSOLUTELY want to hear about the exploits of heroic Hasidic werebear rabbinical ancestors!

From:

oracne

WOW. That sounds EXCELLENT despite lack of balance. Because there is no hope of balancing all that.

From:

chestnut_pod

I found this book to be simultaneously a whole heck of a lot of fun on a plot and concept level, and also almost unreadably agonizing on a character level. It's left me thinking a lot about what I want out of Jewish fantasy and what is possible to convey in Jewish fantasy, which is somewhat difficult, as I have, like, four examples to compare.

I made the perhaps poor decision to read this around the same time as the Pittsburgh shooting, and I spent 100% of the time wanting to shake Laya and wondering how anyone could be so stupid even before the evil goyische enchantments - how do you live in Europe at this time and trust any goy? How do you live in a place that actively, loudly, constantly hates you and believe that you will be safe? Don't you know you're history? Don't you know anything? The whole book I was in agonies just waiting for the shoe to drop, because I knew it would, and I couldn't get any pleasure out of it like I might usually from that kind of narrative tension. I think in the end, I resented her for the innocence I wish I still had, and found it practically unbelievable in a Doylist, world-immersion sense that any late-teens Jewish woman in her situation could really believe in her safety. And then, at the end, the intimation that they will go to America and Everything Will Be Magically Better… I just couldn't swallow it.

So I started comparing this in my head to Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver, which I adored, and which is the only other example of major-press contemporary Jewish fantasy I know of. What made me capable of enjoying that book but not this one? Was it the self-awareness of the POV character? I certainly liked Liba a lot, and she and Miryem are similar in many ways. Was it the fact that it was basically secondary-world (or maybe Ruritanian?) fantasy and thus the very real dangers of antisemitism that the family explicitly faces didn't dovetail as tightly with the real world, and so I couldn't apply my knowledge of real history to the narrative? Was it that it had a more straightforwardly happy ending? Was it that this book just wasn't that well written, but Spinning Silver was, and so Laya was a basic failure of character work that could have happened anywhere and only hit me so personally because of our similarities? In the end, do I truly not have the stomach for Jewish fantasy set in our own world because of my own fear, trauma, and pessimism? That's no way to approach reading. And I certainly wouldn't want all contemporary Jewish fantasy to be as cynical as I am, because that would not encapsulate the Jewish experience(s).

I think my dislike of Laya (and by extension, the book itself) is the same kind of defense mechanism as internalized misogyny - if I am not that foolish, I will be safe. Of course it isn't true. But still, it's hard to stop. I think that, as with book representation generally, the answer is probably more - make it so that we can have our innocent Jewish characters and our weary Jewish characters, and our happy and our sad and our terrifying coexistences, and our dark and our light and our nuanced Jewish worlds.

From:

hamsterwoman

I was very excited about the setting but bounced off the prose poetry hard and gave up after the first Laya chapter. Though obviously YMMV!

From:

thistleingrey

Yes, seriously.

It's good to know about the not quite cohesive part, but it was already on my list and now I am moar excite.

From:

skygiants

Perhaps that'll be her next book!

From:

skygiants

RIGHT? Complicated recipes can be difficult and I respect that but boy, someone went shopping at the right farmer's market for sure.

From:

skygiants

All I knew going in was "Jewish fantasy" so when I hit WERESWANS and WEREBEARS my eyes went *__*!!!!

From:

skygiants

I also am dubious about prose poetry in general and dubious here in specific -- I wasn't really sure what the point of it was, except maybe as a tip of the hat to Goblin Market? But Goblin Market's poetry is very much not prose!

From:

skygiants

Although I did my best to soldier on through the Laya chapters, I sadly cannot say that they worked for me any better with more exposure than they did at the beginning.

From:

skygiants

It's such a good plot! ...or three plots, or five plots, depending on how you count them.

From:

skygiants

[please insert applause gif of your choice here]

From:

skygiants

It definitely did make the chapters VERY distinguishable, but Laya and Liba were different enough in personality that I felt like it was probably not necessary to go to that extreme ... and honestly diminished a little for me the experience of getting to know them as different personalities.

(Then again, I'm switching my current WIP between third person and first person to distinguish voices which is EQUALLY dubious if not moreso, so it's not like I have a high ground here.)

From:

skygiants

Nobody is even around to forbid it! Liba's parents are off on a road trip and the Nice Jewish Boy's family think Liba is great and are ready to adopt her from like day one, Liba is just constantly going around like "well ... this probably will be forbidden ... once this werebear plotline properly kicks in which it won't for 200 more pages ........"

(Laya's romance is really forbidden but it's also VERY CORRECT to be forbidden, nobody is rooting for that one at all.)

Edited Date: 2019-06-08 04:48 am (UTC)

From:

skygiants

I definitely forgive a lot more wonkiness in books that have the ambition to just pile on the plot points and let the chips fall where they may!

From:

skygiants

Same, honestly, on almost every level. I ALSO spent a significant part of the book wanting to shake Laya ... when I could tell what was going on with her, though in some ways the difficulties I had focusing on her plotline through the prose poetry helped me with that. I also had some very ambivalent feelings about the way that Laya seemed so much more alienated from her Jewishness than Liba did from the start, given the eventual parentage reveals; I wish that had been more directly addressed and rebutted, that Laya had felt more like part of the community, and that Liba and Laya had actively talked with each other more about their position and the risks thereof. (I also think it would've been significantly more interesting if Liba and Laya's attitudes towards their Jewishness had been switched.)

I wrote out in my original post, and then deleted, a whole lot of navel-gazey thoughts about Rossner's ending thesis of, like, "We All Go To America And Thus Everything Is Fine For Us" -- because, I mean, that's her family's story, as she says in the epilogue, and it's true for her and how her family tells it, and it's not my job to tell anyone how to interpret their own story. Even if it's a version that doesn't entirely ring true for me, if the version that rings more true for me is Joann Sfar's take in Klezmer, that just because history rolled over the ones who stayed doesn't mean they were wrong, that there was a courage and a virtue in staying and fighting for the living Eastern European community, and that's worth celebrating too.

I haven't read Spinning Silver yet -- I'm 95% positive that I'm going to love it, so I've been saving it as a treat for myself, but I think the moment will very soon come.

From:

the_rck

I tried this as an audiobook and kept losing track of which POV I was hearing at any given time because the narrator didn't distinguish between the two in any audible way. If I was distracted and missed the announcement of POV change, I couldn't tell which sister was talking. In a paper book, I'd have been able to page back to check.

I ended up giving up on the audiobook, but I really wished that they'd had two readers.

From:

chestnut_pod

Gosh, I hadn't even thought of the whole parentage reveal/Laya's ambivalence connection. You're right, I wish that had been troubled more in the text.

How interesting, I don't think my ebook version had that afterword section (or else it was in the acknowledgements that I did not read?) - I think that would have changed my perspective on the ending. As you say, I don't want to butt in on someone's familial narrativizing. Nevertheless, if you are interested in putting your navel-gazey thoughts out there, I would be interested in hearing them.

I loved Spinning Silver. I hope you enjoy it when it comes around!

From:

thistleingrey

Those are very compelling, agreed!

From:

skygiants

In a paper book it would have been very obvious because Laya's sections are written with constant line breaks like

Did you sleep well?
he says when he sees me.
Mmhmmm, I nod.
It is the only sound
I can make.
My lips are sore.
I feel my cheeks flush.

(I already returned my library book so this excerpt is from the Tor.com review, which didn't like the prose poetry either.)