[Spoilers!]
This book was great. It passes the Bechdel Test, with some strong female characters who regularly interact, and the female protagonist makes friends with mystical creatures and creates a coalition to fight the main antagonist (though it may not have worked), then throws off the yoke of traditional sex and gender roles to chart her own path. There’s some good explicit (and better implicit) commentary on social roles.
What I liked most about this book, however, was the world-building, and it’s philosophical extensions. The mythical creatures and spirits, as part of Russian folklore, are natural extensions of the earth and society. The Frost Demon represents order, and everything ordered: life & death, time (but strangely, only winter, out of all the seasons), etc. His brother, the Bear, represents chaos and all things chaotic: disorder, the undead, anger, fear. Chaos is the natural state, thus many of the earth creatures side with the Bear, but men and his societal creatures side with order, and order can cage chaos. Even the magic plays on bringing order out of the chaos: everything is potentially many things (very postmodern), and the trick is to make it be the thing you want.
The Catholic Church in all this plays an unwitting role. Preaching that the myths and folklore counteract god, the priests get the people to foresake their household spirits, which only a select few can see, thus weakening the order these spirits bring and opening up the house to chaos. To those holy folk who can’t see, the folklore seems like a big appeal to tradition. To those who can see, they have manifest proof that demons walk among us, and never look further for the why or how of it. And they are easily led astray when the spirits represent themselves as god. Only those who can see and are brought up in the folk tradition understand the roles these spirits play, and can help them and call for their aid, but these sighted folk are branded as witches and ostracized. We never see any power from the Christian god, save the power to shut mythical creatures out of their areas (churches, priests’ chambers) and even then, the baddies get in.
Overall, it makes me want to keep reading the series to see where this all goes next.
Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale.
