To save her family from poverty, Miryem takes over her father’s moneylending business. She is colder than he is, has no love for the villagers who have watched her starve, and finds it easier not to take no for an answer. Wanda is coerced into working off her cruel father’s debt, eventually learning that there is freedom in the opportunities that Miryem has presented her with. Things are going well until Miryem starts to make a bit too much money and captures the attention of the gold hungry Lord of the Staryk. It will take all the love of her family, natural and found, as well as a calculatingly intelligent Tsarina, to help Miryem untangle the web that she has unwittingly created.
Miryem is a hugely powerful character. She starts her journey as a weak victim and sets out to do what needs to be done for her and her family, taking no prisoners along the way. As her power grows so does her compassion and her understanding of how it could be used to help those around her. Many of her choices are taken away from her which makes the choices she does make all the more important. Similarly both Wanda and Irina, despite their vastly different situations in life, both begin the story with few choices of their own. It is empowering to see them learn how to manipulate their situations to their own advantage and then later to see them reach out and grab the choices for themselves, changing not only their own fates but also the fates of those around them.
I expected the Staryk Lord’s involvement from early on, but later fantastical characters were more of a surprise and added an extra level of complex intensity to the narrative. The Staryk Kingdom presents a unique setting and Naomi has gone into a great level of detail to describe their society and customs without overwhelming the reader with unnecessary information.
A particularly innovative part of this book is the large number of first person narrators explored throughout and how they are slowly added one by one as their viewpoints become useful and relevant to the central story. The larger events of the book seem most often to be narrated by smaller characters which gives us an almost wider experience of the scene and allowed the more complicated elements to be simplified into what an ordinary person could understand.
However, what really pulled this book together was the theme of familial love throughout. There is the love between Miryem and her parents, their adoption of Wanda, the link between Staryk bondsmen the strong ties between Wanda and her brothers, and the close relationship between Irina and Magreta. It is these bonds that hold the story together and spur it forward and it is these bonds that I will remember going forwards.
Escape to the Bookshelf 