Elena May's Reviews > The Winter of the Witch

I learned an important life lesson from this trilogy: If a fanatic priest ever comes to your home causing trouble, and a cannibalistic lake spirit helpfully offers to eat him, JUST LET HER DO IT!

I still remember reading The Bear and the Nightingale and reaching the part where the rusalka nicely offers to eat Konstantin and Vasya stops her. I was screaming at Vasya to just step aside and let her do it. And then, as Konstantin’s future actions lead to so much suffering and so many lives lost, I kept thinking how it would have been the right decision. Then comes The Girl in the Tower, he causes even more trouble, and I grow even madder than he didn’t find his final resting place in a rusalka’s stomach years ago. And then comes this book, and my hatred for him manages to grow even more.

But this is only of testament of the strong writing and characters. The book is pure magic, whimsical and atmospheric, and it perfectly captures the spirit of the original fairy tales.

This is going to be a very weird review. While this is one of the best books I have read in the past couple of years, I think I’ll spend half the review criticizing things I didn’t like (and then I’ll spend the other half talking about mushrooms, but I’ll get to that later).

But perhaps that’s not too weird. Usually, the more I like a book, the more I complain about things that could have been better. Seriously, I challenge you to look through my 5-star reviews and find one where I don’t complain about anything. In fact, you are more likely to find 3-star reviews where I have nothing bad to say.

I’ll try to keep spoilers vague, but you’ll understand better what I mean if you’ve read the book.

COMPLAINING TIME!

Things I didn’t like:

1. The way Vasya returns Morozko’s memories

It felt clichéd. What is this, an upgraded version of a First Love’s Kiss from Once Upon a Time? I thought it would have been more fitting to use a more mystical method, perhaps using the nightingale talisman. And then Olga takes one look at Vasya and figures out what happened, explaining “credit me with some perception, I’ve seen enough girls wed.” Hmm, and what is “a girl wed” supposed to look like? Have a big glowing letter on her forehead? And Olga’s next question is if Vasya was willing. So she somehow figures out what happened, but not if Vasya is happy or unhappy about it. It makes no sense to me.

2. Dehumanization of the Tatars

Yes, they were invaders and did terrible things. But, considering how badly Tatars are treated in Russia nowadays (I have friends who have been horribly harassed by authorities, police, and random people, it’s not pleasant) I feel it’s the wrong time to have a very high profile book where the Tatars are less human than the literal demons. We see only two named characters, and none of them has any personality. And all the others are a faceless horde. When Vasya is presented to a tent of Tatars, the single Russian person is the only one who shows her compassion. I’m not saying make the Tatars good guys. By all means, make them bad. But make them complex bad, with personality, and motivations, and quirks. Make them human.

Even the Bear, who conspires to destroy all humans and causes fear, sickness and chaos, is given a lot more character development. His motivations are clear, he is given charm and humor, and he even gets some redeeming qualities in his twisted love for Konstantin. And Midnight, who causes a lot of pain, is a sympathetic character. Only the Tatars remain completely faceless and interchangeable, and it makes an otherwise great book suffer for it.

3. Timelines and ages

That’s pretty minor, but it’s been bugging me. Everyone who hears about Vasya’s great-grandmother is first shocked and then immediately says there’s no way she could still be alive, and she must surely be dead. But… why? Vasya is 17. One of my great-grandmothers lived until I was 21, and at Vasya’s time, women were having children younger, so it was not uncommon to have great-grandparents, or even great-great-grandparents around. Sure, Vasya is not the first child in the family and her mother was a bit older when she had her, and I’m not saying it’s likely, but I’m saying it’s not as absolutely impossible as everyone in the book claims.

And before anyone says, “But it’s the Middle Ages, average life expectance was 30!”—that’s not how it works. As I also mentioned in my review of The Bear and the Nightingale where the description of characters’ ages was bugging me for a different reason, average expectancy of 30 doesn’t mean people dropped dead at 30. It means an extremely high child mortality. But if you survived childhood, and you avoided catching a serious infectious disease, you had decent chances to live well into old age.

And, speaking of timelines, summer turns to winter in a couple of weeks. While Vasya mentions it’s early for snow, we never see a proper explanation.

4. Everyone constantly mentioning how ugly Vasya is

Come on. No one is universally beautiful or ugly, people have preferences, and I find it hard to believe that everyone who meets Vasya will: first, find her ugly, second, say it out loud, and third, somehow get attracted to her anyway.

5. The Chernomor connection

It felt unnecessary. Baba Yaga is already very powerful, Vasya doesn’t need extra explanation for the magic in her blood. While the Tsar Saltan fairytales were among my favorite as a kid, this reference felt artificial, without much connection to the rest.

ENOUGH COMPLAINING, LET’S TALK ABOUT MUSHROOMS!

Did I mention this is going to be a strange review?

If you’ve read my review of The Miniaturist, you know I have a slight problem when it comes to food in books. Namely, if a food is mentioned often, or described in detail, I start craving it and need to drop everything else and go find it and eat it asap. It’s annoying, really, but I can’t help it. With The Miniaturist it was marzipan, with Game of Thrones it was lemon cakes. And here, as Ded Grib became quite a prominent character, it had to be mushrooms, or, in particular, what Vasya calls lisichki .

And that’s the strange thing about how my brain works when it comes to food in fiction—at first I couldn’t figure out which mushroom type that was, but I kept thinking “Oooh these sound delicious, I need to have them! Now!” Then I checked it out, and found out it’s the mushroom that back home we call “duck’s foot” (apparently, it’s chanterelle in English, good to learn something new!) Imagine my surprise to find out it’s actually my favorite type of mushroom—it looks so cool and tastes like heaven.

I had to have it. The thing it, I’ve been living in Germany for some time, and I couldn’t remember ever seeing this type of mushrooms here, and I had no idea where to look for them. But then I went to the supermarket for some other reason, and there they were, my precious babies, just one single tiny packet of them in the whole supermarket. And they were imported from Bulgaria, so of course I had to buy them immediately.

Annoyingly, they were extremely overprized—if I paid one tenth of that prize back home, it would be considered crazy expensive. Honestly, if my mom hears I’ve spent 3.50 EUR on 150 grams of mushrooms, she’ll disown me, and I’m not exaggerating. It’s pretty infuriating knowing the people who picked them get paid next to nothing, and then a German supermarket chain gets to label them as some fancy product and make tons of profit. They even have the audacity to mention “handpicked” on the label like it makes it high class. Of course it’s handpicked, it’s wild mushrooms. And the human labor is cheaper than any mushroom harvesting machine that would have worked.

If it wasn’t for this book, I would have probably skipped, but, as I said, I can’t fight this weird fiction food cravings. So I ended up cooking them with butter, white wine, quark and chives:

I’d like to think that’s exactly how Vasya would have cooked them if she had the chance. Chives is believed to come from Siberia, and quark is super popular throughout Russia, so there you go.

ENOUGH MUSHROOMS, LET’S GET BACK TO THE PROPER REVIEW!

The book picks up right after The Girl in the Tower ends, and we jump straight into the action. The plot is extremely engaging from the first page, probably because we already know and love the characters. Magic is everywhere, from the strange creatures to the distant realms that one reaches through midnight roads.

While I guessed the nature of Morozko’s prison, I loved that part of the story when Vasya arrives at the old town where people can still see spirits. It felt straight out of a fairytale, and I would have loved to spend more time there. Though I wasn’t a fan of how the bath scene was handled, the rest of that setting was one of my favorite parts in the book. Now I want to go back and reread the old fairytales.

I was happy to see that the actually holy priests are effective when fighting the demons. Because of Konstantin, I was afraid all priests would turn out to be cartoonishly incompetent, which would have made Sasha look naïve.

After the Bear was defeated, and the Tatars became the new threat, I was afraid the conflict would become more mundane, leaving behind the fairytale feel. I needn’t have worried! The magic keeps growing and everything ties together perfectly! I love the idea of humans and spirits allying together to defend their land, and how Vasya’s choices played a central role. Her decisions were never strictly good, and often seemed reckless, but at the end shaped the course of history, for better or for worse. Beautiful trilogy. I am sad it ended, but it was a good end.