Shannon's Review - The Bear And The Nightingale by Katherine Arden

Title: The Bear And The Nightingale
Series: #1 The Winternight Trilogy
Author: Katherine Arden
Illustrator/Book Cover Design: David G. Stevenson (Design) and Robert Hunt(Illustration)
Genre: Fiction, Fantasy, Fairies, Magic
Publisher: Del Ray
Received: Purchased
Release Date: Jan 2017
Pages: 319
Rating:




Author Katherine Arden’s Official Websites:





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https://katherineardenbooks.com/

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Shannon’s Thoughts:

Vasilisa and her family live in the Russian wilderness. She and her siblings love to sit around the fire and listen to tales of magic, myth, and fairy tales. They live in a time when some still left food to honor the spirits of hearth and home. Vasilisa's mother passes, and her father remarries a woman who does not believe in the old tales and refuses to leave things to spirits. The town and its crops start to fail, and Vasilisa, who has magic in her blood, must become part of myth and fairy tales to save her family.

I read this before I read A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, and there are some similarities in the main character. Vasilisa, like Feyre, loves her family and fights for them, and they both become part of the fairy tale. I love stories like this, with magic and mythology mixed. Some of the book comes very close to a horror-like feeling that I enjoyed. It reminded me of a Mike Flanagan TV series.

I wished Vasilisa's stepmother had avoided the evil stepmother trope, but the story would have been very different without her.

If you enjoyed A Court of Thorns and Roses, you might also like this. It is not as spicy as ACOTAR, but there is some romance.