The nameless Staryk lord promises Miryem that if she can complete the task he assigns her three times, she’ll gain powers and become his bride.Įverything about this premise screams “YES” to me. They say that the Staryk are the ones who bring winter, and they are always trying to steal the human’s gold. The Staryk are mysterious ice beings that bring winter with them wherever they go. Soon enough, her talents draw out a Staryk lord who will kill her if she does not make the silver coins he gives her into gold. Her tenacity and determination make for a cold yet successful businesswoman that soon allows her sick mother to heal and her family to gain back their wealth. Soon though, Miryem takes things into her own hand and starts becoming the moneylender in the family. He’s never taking back the money he borrowed and this leaves their small family poor and hungry. Miryem’s father is a moneylender, but a very passive one. Words can’t express how much I adored Miryem, the main POV that this book follows. Both books are amazing for different reasons, and I can’t wait for readers to pick up and love Spinning Silver like I did. While the books are not connected at all, they follow a similar fantastical theme, with the most recent being fairy-tale based. This was another winner from Naomi Novik! After reading and adoring Uprooted when I first started reviewing books (you can find my review here), I was exceptionally eager for Spinning Silver and I was NOT disappointed.
I wrote and figured and wrote and figured, interest and time broken up by all the little haphazard scattered payments… And when I had my list finished, I took all the knitting out of my bag, put my shawl on, and went out into the cold morning.”Īnd thus begins Miryem’s beginning as a cold moneylender, and eventually the queen of the cold. “A moneylender’s daughter, even a bad moneylender, learns her numbers. When her grandfather loans her a pouch of silver pennies, she brings it back full of gold.īut having the reputation of being able to change silver to gold can be more trouble than it’s worth–especially when her fate becomes tangled with the cold creatures that haunt the wood, and whose king has learned of her reputation and wants to exploit it for reasons Miryem cannot understand.
Hardening her heart against her fellow villagers’ pleas, she sets out to collect what is owed–and finds herself more than up to the task. Free to lend and reluctant to collect, he has loaned out most of his wife’s dowry and left the family on the edge of poverty–until Miryem steps in. Miryem is the daughter and granddaughter of moneylenders… but her father isn’t a very good one.
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