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Moscow is in ruins, and Vasya is blamed for everything by the people around her. They believe her gifts have caused all that has gone wrong. Vasya learns more about who she is and what she can do as she explores her special powers. Katherine Arden’s bestselling debut novel spins an irresistible spell as it announces the arrival of a singular talent with a gorgeous voice. This wintery trilogy has become exactly that for me - reminding me of all the reasons why I love literature. This year I have read a few series that starts good and get better and better with every book in the series and this is a very good example of that. This is mostly a review of book 3 with a bit about book 2 but the series as a whole ended with the expectations that I had for it when I first started it and I salute the author for that. This is going to be a very weird review. While this is one of the best books I have read in the past couple of years, I think I’ll spend half the review criticizing things I didn’t like (and then I’ll spend the other half talking about mushrooms, but I’ll get to that later).
Moscow is in flames, leaving its people searching for answers – and someone to blame. Vasilisa, a girl with extraordinary gifts, must flee for her life, pursued by those who blame their misfortune on her magic. In a village at the edge of the wilderness of northern Russia, where the winds blow cold and the snow falls many months of the year, an elderly servant tells stories of sorcery, folklore and the Winter King to the children of the family, tales of old magic frowned upon by the church.But for the young, wild Vasya these are far more than just stories. She alone can see the house spirits that guard her home, and sense the growing forces of dark magic in the woods. . .I cannot help myself not to cry over this end! Don’t take me wrong, of course there are so many tragic elements about the ending of the story and I waited at least three weeks after I ended the second book because I know that I didn’t want to say goodbye to Vasya, Morozkov, even Sasha, Marya, chyerti of the heart and of course Solovey! KA: I really have been: various conventions, various cons. I was at BookExpo America. There will be a lot of giveaways and other things like that leading up to the release. Content and trigger warnings for talk of death during childbirth, graphic animal death, graphic torture, graphic violence, sexual assault (unwanted touching), threat of rape, death, murder, blood depictions, slavery, captivity, and war themes. Maternal Death? Blame the Child!: During a moment of frustration, Olga tells Sasha Vasya killed their mother. Sasha calls this out as cruel.
Vasya is the heroine you cannot stop admiring. Such a growth from book 1! She transformed from a barefoot child into a grown fierce woman any creature would be honored to follow. She is brave, she is loyal - she is a true hero everyone needed. There is a lot of power in the final book of the Winternight Trilogy. This book starts off where The Girl in the Tower ends. If you have not read the first two books in the series, it is imperative that you read them first otherwise you will not know what is going on in this book. The court of the Grand Prince of Moscow is plagued by power struggles and rumours of unrest. Meanwhile bandits roam the countryside, burning the villages and kidnapping its daughters. Setting out to defeat the raiders, the Prince and his trusted companion come across a young man riding a magnificent horse. richly detailed and emotionally satisfying, everything that happens here slots perfectly into the world arden has created and respects the events of her previous books—every grief and failure, every bittersweet success is 100% earned. one of my personal grumbles with fantasy as a genre is that, where there is magic, where there are characters with powers, obstacles are frequently too easily overcome and all the potential for delicious dramatic tension is sidestepped. here, nothing is easy, nothing is deus ex machina'd away, and when powerful beings do intervene, it is never without a cost.I hope you appreciate my attempts to make this review more atmospheric by adding some pictures of my travels through Russia – this one was taken in Великий Новгород (Veliky Novgorod), and the beautiful wooden architecture helped inspire how I imagined Vasya’s village Lesnaya Zemlya. Enthralling and enchanting – I literally couldn’t put it down. A wondrous book! Tamora Pierce, bestselling author of the Song of the Lionness Quartet Kudos to the author for a job exceptionally well-done, and I cannot wait to see what else Katherine Arden has in store for us. Total book love.
Arden’s debut novel has the cadence of a beautiful fairy tale but is darker and more lyrical.”—The Washington Post It felt unnecessary. Baba Yaga is already very powerful, Vasya doesn’t need extra explanation for the magic in her blood. While the Tsar Saltan fairytales were among my favorite as a kid, this reference felt artificial, without much connection to the rest. This trilogy stole my heart and I want to read them in near future to rediscover some details I may have missed. This was a very long comment and I was actually trying to restrain myself 😅 I so very glad that you loved these books as much as I do.i don't want to get into too many details, because it's book 3 of a thing, but i need to shout-out that l'il mushroom ded grib as my favorite new character. i'm sure this series will be turned into a show or film at some point, and i'm gonna want some ded grib merch. to play with my baby yoda merch. because i am grown. Vasilisa Petrovna is an unforgettable heroine determined to forge her own path. Her gifts and her courage have drawn the attention of Morozko, the winter-king, but it is too soon to know if this connection will prove a blessing or a curse. Then, Morozko. After Solovey, he’s probably my second-favorite character in the entire series. I loved how he had this dark, cold, “I reap the dead”-side to him, but was also the only one who fully understood Vasya and let her live her life without judging her every second of the way. And boy, did he and Vasya have chemistry. It immediately made me forget any initial thoughts I had about Konstantin and Vasya maybe getting together (Ugh, I know. I don’t know what I was thinking 😅). And that bathhouse scene we got in The Winter of the Witch? It was everything I had never even dreamed of asking for. And then Vasya went and introduced him to Olga has her demon-boyfriend, and my heart just couldn’t take how adorable it was… beautiful literary fairytale...incredibly lyrical prose...a joy to read. Arden opens her imagination wide and succeeds in transporting the reader to an evocative world...with a heroine it's impossible not to love... Stylist There are no monsters in the world, and no saints. Only infinite shades woven into the same tapestry, light and dark. One man's monster is another man's beloved. The wise know that."
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