The Bear and the Nightingale

I'm surprised I finished it. For me, The Bear and the Nightingale was a rather boring fairytale. It was supposedly driven by its characters, but the characters didn't seem driven themselves, and I found every single one of them uninteresting, boring, or lackluster, with the few characters complex enough to hold any attention being rather despicable.

My biggest gripe is the double-standards and flatlining of characters. Anna, the stepmother, seems at first sympathetic, when it is revealed she has the Sight and is used by men in different ways, as power plays and as a bride/wife, yet for the rest of the story, there is nothing done with her to sympathise with her plight, and she becomes nothing but the evil stepmother. Her Sight and her plight is undermined by her cruelty, and she becomes something one-note. Still, the book tries to have feminist themes, but those feminist themes are offered only to the special girl, the wild girl, the wood-sprite Vasya, and no other woman is given the chance to have a choice. It is especially annoying that Vasya is given the opportunity to whine about the plight of women, when she had never been squandered by it like the rest. She had been running free in the forest since childhood, she escaped bridehood and wifedom, and she wasn't sent to a convent–of all the women and girls, she's the only one that has always been free, and she is the only one who gets to be free. She's special, and freedom is only for the special ones. I don't know whether that was Arden's angle, but that's how her writing made it seem.

Another double-standard is that between Konstantin and Morozko. Apparently lusting after teens is bad if you're a priest but if you're an immortal frost-lord, you can kiss them without consent just fine and can lord your powers over them without issue.

The whole first part of the book ended up being bloated and useless. So much of it could have been cut, and what little of it was relevant could have been interspersed throughout the other parts of the story as flashbacks or tales. The only thing the book had going for it was the prose, which has a distinct lyrical rhythm to it. It wasn't particularly conducive to battle-scenes however, and so the ‘climax' didn't feel like much of anything.

Then also comes the whole Russian aspect of it all. Multiple other reviewers in the 1-star and 2-star sections have touched upon it and they're very much correct. Arden wanted to have her cake and eat it too, make the main family “rich” boyars but present them more like peasants so that they'd be more relatable and to give Vasya the freedom needed for her to do the Cool Witch Girl Shtick she had been doing her whole life. The exoticism made apparent by the Author's Note also churns my stomach. I'm not Russian, but I share their Slavic roots, and Arden's parting words have left a bad taste in my mouth.

Overall, the story doesn't do anything special, its messaging is bogged down by Not Like The Other Girls syndrome (aka misogyny), double standards, and its characters lack the charm of real people, which makes the book's lack of plot all the more troublesome. At least the prose makes the reading experience overall smooth, even if I needed to recharge my attention span every 10 pages because of the boredom.