After the strength of Uprooted, I was excited for this one, but it fell a little flat. I was really excited by the potential of this world when these mysterious Staryk moving roads showed up in the early novel, but was disappointed in the result.
Overall the novel is much more strongly rooted in fairy tale land (Rumpelstiltskin) than Uprooted. That leads to these fairly ridiculous plot constructions where someone agrees to a grand bargain and the other party tries to come up with a clever way around the letter of the agreement. The dialog sounds like this:
“Of course you can, mortal girl,” he said over his shoulder, as if I was the one being a fool. “A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true; the proving makes it so.”
And of course if you do manage to weasel your way out of the deal, the villain needs to be all honourable and stick to their side of the deal. Just like, well, real bad guys would never do.
I liked the idea of the Staryk being kinda like the white walkers from GoT except instead of just an evil domination foil, we actually get to discover their true motivation. That would have worked a lot better without the trope-laden fairytale framework.
There's quite an interesting treatment of Judaism, and struggle against widespread antisemitism.
The worst part of the whole novel though is really the huge number of first-person POVs. It gets crazy. It feels like every single character is getting their own POV, and it's really draining to read. Why should I care what this person thinks? They will disappear in a few pages anyway.
3 stars
