Rhapsody: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

The author tells us on the first page that Spinning Silver is about paying one’s debts. And maybe that is the moral of those fairytales, pay your debts or else, stay in your place or else. But this story is about so much more than that, its about reaching outside those boundaries for a greater you.

The story explores the experiences of 3 young women, each in some capacity a rendition of the Miller’s Daughter’s Tale (as described at the beginning of the book). Through the perspectives of these women as well as those of some outside characters we see them seize agency over their lives from supernatural or mundane forces. They explore what their desires will cost them and weight those debts in the balance, even to taking the agency of changing the terms when the harm outweighs the good. They explore what family means, terrible ones and good ones, finding family and loosing it. What each thinks their value as a person is and how growing as a person is about:

…making some larger version of yourself with words and promises, and then stepping inside and somehow growing to fill it

I think it might be the best book I have read this year, certainly one of the most uplifting. Which you can tell because I don’t have anything to complain about.