The Bear and the Nightingale

Beautifully written, but challenging pacing and some things that left a bitter taste.
This book's writing was whimsical and swept you up into the wintery and enchanting world that the story is set in. I thoroughly enjoyed the world, especially all the little spirits and the nod towards religious fanaticism.
BUT. The story is extremely slow paced. While the writing style makes up for that to a certain extent, I felt myself growing frustrated and bored often, especially because the story jumps around between characters, none of which are really followed through with except for Vasya. I found myself caring little about some of the characters and it takes a long time for the story to take off.
This also brings me to one of the things I hate encountering - when authors are unneccessarily cruel to their characters. To exemplify: We are supposed to like Pyotr. Yet, he (much much older than her) “takes Anna to bed” every night for the first period of their marriage, while she is sobbing and crying. Why? I'm guessing the author's argument would be “because that's the way it was back then”. But this reason just does not fly with me. This is a fantasy book. This does not add enough to the character to justify it, on the contrary, it makes me actively dislike Pyotr, who is supposed to be a kind father figure. This was not needed to show the role of women historically, since we get plenty of that at other points in the story.
All in all, I am curious what will happen to Morozko and Alyosha, but not sure whether my interest is peaked enough to continue reading the series. At the rate that characters bitch slap other characters in this book though, I'll be sure to have my fun flask ready.