Title The Bear and the Nightingale Author Katherine Arden Cover Art Robert Hunt Publisher Del Rey - 2017 First Printing Del Rey - 2017
	Title The Girl in the Tower Author Katherine Arden Cover Art Publisher First Printing
	Title The Winter of the Witch Author Katherind Arden Cover Art Publisher First Printing
	Category Fairy Tale Warnings None Main Characters Vasilia, Pyotr, Dunya, Sasha, Alyosha, Olga, Morozko, Medved, Konstantin, Solovey Main Elements Gods, spirits, witches Website katherinearden.com

The Bear and the Nightingale

I was really looking forward to this one, it had a lot of hype and having enjoyed another Russian fairy tale based story (Uprooted by Naomi Novik) I was looking for more of the same.

Well, I started off rather disappointed. I found the start hard to read, as in the writing style and language, but that was fair enough, nothing wrong with making a reader work a bit. But it was also rather slow for perhaps the first half. After all, I picked up this book to read a fantasy involving gods and magic, not to read a historical novel of Russian Boyar life. We get introduced to Vasya's family, a couple get sent off to Moscow not to be really heard from again, and we get the occasional face peeping around the corner of the oven. I didn't really get attached to any of the characters, though Arden does an excellent job of presenting Boyar life. One thing didn't jive though, Vasya's mother essentially starved to death the winter her daughter was born, and yet her father had enough money to make an impressive enough dowry for Olga to marry a prince...if the rich were starving to death, how were there any servants or peasants left in that village? It seemed the family prospered and suffered at the whims of the plot.

I also had some trouble keeping track of people's names (which I hear is a common problem with other Russian books like Crime and Punishment). Everyone has a name, and a nickname, and a diminutive name, and their last names are their father's names so you get people like Ivan Ivanovitch so the same name can show up in different parts of two different people's names. This is not the author's fault because she was trying to keep her story authentic, I just recommend maybe taking notes till you can keep people straight.

However, things do pick up as the Frost King starts taking more of an interest in Vasya. Here is an interesting character, he is Death incarnate, yet seems to want to protect the world from his even scarier brother, the Bear. Interesting thing about many death gods though, they don't tend to be the ones that actually cause death (why bother, everyone dies eventually and a human lifetime is short, can just wait and they all come to you anyway). So he seems to be a good guy, but he's also kind of a bad guy, well...guess that just defines a force of nature. At least while the reader tries to figure out what intentions he has towards Vasya, the story gets much more interesting.

And if you love horses, Vasya learns to speak their language, but Arden does a good job of keeping the regular horses just well, regular horses. Just because they can talk to her doesn't mean they are more intelligent and still act like a horse should. Of course there are supernatural horses too, at least one of which is actually also a bird...its complicated, and actually a tad confusing as I never really did figure out who the Nightingale in the title is.

But, much as I didn't love the first book, I think I got int the world deep enough to want to read more. There is still something to be said to be exposed to new folklore and to learn about new creatures, beliefs and mythologies. And what happens when a new religions supplants the old.

So while the book was compared to Uprooted (guess just due to the Russian fairy tale connection) I found it was a lot more similar in tone and intent as American Gods by Neil Gaiman, which has it's own old Russian god, Chernobog...who may in fact also be the Bear...as Arden wrote somewhere, the pagan god of death eventually evolved into Father Christmas, so imagine we're somewhere in the middle of that process when reading this book.