Review: The Bear and the Nightingale

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

With two false starts I forced myself to read beyond the third page. While I was anticipating the book, the author seemed like she did her homework and actually went to the trouble of understanding Russian history and folklore. But on the second page we see the "frost-demon, the winter-king Karachun." Maybe I'm missing something, but I never heard any pagan god referred to by that name. Karachun is the Winter Solstice! And no, bread and fermented cabbage were not the only things allowed/available during the fast.
There were lots of little and not so little mistakes like that in the book: pine-nuts in a forest somewhere two weeks from Moscow at the beginning of the 14th century; women wearing their long hair loose and uncovered; a maiden stripping in the forest and swimming in a lake naked; a funeral on the next day after death; or a place (still two weeks from Moscow), where the Sun doesn't set in summer, but apparently still rises in winter. And that thing with vampires? Who kills a vampire with a birch-tree stake? For several chapters I expected it to backfire, but it never did. The one really big thing that threw me off was an unmarried priest. He is one of the key characters and his wife, apparently, didn't fit into the plot. The problem is, in Orthodox church, a person cannot, under any circumstances, become a priest until he's married.
Having all that said, after I got through my first astonishment at the author's interpretation of folklore stories, I really liked this book. It is a well written, thrilling, and absorbing story. At some points it was like reading the Lord of the Flies set is a fairy tale. At others, it was really chilling and reminding me that the Winter is indeed older than Summer. Even with all the misconceptions, the author managed to recreate the darkness and wildness of the pagan gods, and that touches deeper than most books ever can.

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