Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Published 2018 · 480 pages · 166,572 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Fantasy

How hard is Spinning Silver to read?

Spinning Silver scores 40 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 38 out of 100
Yiddish and Russian-inflected vocabulary. Novik creates distinct voices for her three narrators.
Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
Three first-person voices with distinct cadences. Each narrator's syntax reflects her background.
Abstraction: 42 out of 100
Themes of value, transformation, and agency explored through fairy-tale logic.
Information density: 45 out of 100
Three interwoven storylines with distinct worlds: Jewish community, peasant household, royal court, Staryk kingdom.
Narrative indirection: 42 out of 100
Three first-person narrators whose stories interweave. The reader assembles connections across viewpoints.
Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
Silver to gold as value creation. The Staryk winter as external threat and internal cold. Moneylending as Jewish survival strategy.
Ironic distance: 30 out of 100
Novik writes fairy tales with conviction. The subversions are structural, not tonal.
Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
All three storylines resolve satisfyingly. Clear, complete ending.
Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
Three interweaving first-person narratives. The braided structure is the novel's main complexity.

How Spinning Silver is regarded

Spinning Silver holds a literary regard score of 40 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where Spinning Silver sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (295 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Spinning Silver scores 35 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Romance
Thrice you shall turn silver to gold for me, or be changed to ice yourself.
Symbol: Mythical (archetypal)
A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true; the proving makes it so.
Mythos: Romance iii (the quest) (romance iii)
and all of it together, every last one, I turned at once to shining gold.
Genre: Romance + Novel
“I’ve come to settle your account.”

Where the story of Spinning Silver takes place

  • Lithvas: a secondary Eastern European world (Vysnia, Koron, the shtetl town of Pavys), seven years into worsening winter, the main setting
  • The Staryk kingdom: the glass mountain and the white road under perpetual winter

7 things that are true of Spinning Silver, with the passage for each

  1. Wanda is first taken into Miryem's household to work off a debt of six silver kopeks.

    Gorek had borrowed six silver kopeks

  2. The first ring made from Staryk silver is sold to the duke of Vysnia for ten zlotek.

    He bought the ring for ten zlotek on the spot

  3. The Staryk's terms are three silver-to-gold changings, or Miryem is turned to ice.

    Thrice you shall turn silver to gold for me, or be changed to ice yourself.

  4. The book is narrated in several first-person voices, including Stepon, a boy who describes himself through his goats.

    I like goats because I know what they will do.

  5. Miryem names Flek's daughter Rebekah bat Flek.

    “Your name is Rebekah bat Flek,”

  6. The Staryk king names the demon in the tsar as Chernobog.

    I have never seen your face before, but I know your name, Chernobog.

  7. The book ends with the Staryk king's true name left unrevealed to the reader.

    But I won’t ever tell you what it is.

Scenes in Spinning Silver that Frye would name

64 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Senex iratus, untitled
Who do you think is master in this house? You don’t say no to me! Gorek is the blocking father, selling Wanda for a jug of krupnik.
Anagnorisis, untitled
I said through a throat suddenly choked and tight, “You didn’t make this winter.” Miryem recognizes that the winter was not the Staryk's work but the demon's, reversing her whole view of the war.
Sparagmos, untitled
my ribs pierced into my lungs, my hips cracked apart so that my legs dangled, my jaw hung loose with teeth falling out of it like loose pebbles. Mirnatius recalls his body being smashed to pieces by the Staryk and driven by the demon.
Agon, untitled
He shrieked in horror as the silver changed around him. The climactic contest against Chernobog, won by turning the hoard to sunlight.
Katabasis, untitled
He seized my wrist, burning cold where his gloved fingers brushed me, and then he jerked me through the doorway. Miryem is pulled out of the sunlit world into the Staryk realm.
Katabasis, untitled
But no glass met my face, only winter, biting at my cheeks. Irina steps through the mirror into the winter forest, escaping the demon-haunted bedroom.

Books that share these scenes with Spinning Silver

About the author

Naomi Novik