#CBR13 Book 3: "The Sisters of the Winter Wood" by Rena Rossner

Page count: 488 pages

Audio book length: 10 hrs 46 mins

Rating: 3.5 stars

Official book description:

In a remote village surrounded by vast forests on the border of Moldova and Ukraine, sisters Liba and Laya have been raised on the honeyed scent of their Mami’s babka and the low rumble of their Tati’s prayers. But when a troupe of mysterious men arrives, Laya falls under their spell – despite their mother’s warning to be wary of strangers. And this is not the only danger lurking in the woods.

As dark forces close in on their village, Liba and Laya discover a family secret passed down through generations. Faced with a magical heritage they never knew existed, the sisters realize the old fairy tales are true…and could save them all.

While the main story of this young adult fantasy novel with heavy fairytale elements is fictional, it's based on true historical events and the towns and places referenced really did exist back in 1903. Rena Rossner's extended family all came from the area and villages in question, and in the afterword, she explains that the ones that didn't escape after the pogroms and persecutions started in 1903, the ones who were still there in 1942, didn't survive the Nazi Holocaust. She wanted to write a book honouring her family and heritage, and also really wanted to do a retelling of Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, because the story of the two sisters always appealed to her. As well as the influences from the Victorian poem about sisters tempted by seductive fruit sellers, Rossner also includes elements from Ukranian and Russian folklore with their bear-men and swan-maidens. 

When Liba and Laya are left alone in their little cabin in the woods outside the village of Dubossary (which is now near the borders of Moldova and Ukraine) after their father and mother are called away, hearing that their father's father, a legendary rabbi is on his death bed. While the young women are in their late teens, they have lived a sheltered life and are not used to independence. A Jewish couple from the village are supposed to be looking in on them occasionally, but they appear to have up and left town very suddenly, without leaving word. 

Laya, the youngest of the two sisters, especially chafes at all of their parents' restrictions, and is very easily tempted by the handsome fruitseller brothers, the Hovlins, who have just arrived in town. She seems like she cannot get enough of their luscious fruit or the company of one of the young men. She sneaks out every night to meet with him. Liba, on the other hand, feels herself getting the creeps every time she goes near the fruitsellers. Their obviously anti-Semitic views don't endear them to her either. She tries to warn her sister away, but her words have little sway with her besotted younger sister. 

Before their parents left them, they imparted long-held family secrets to the girls. Liba has the power to shift into a bear, like her father, and they come from a long line of Hasidic rabbis who gained the ability to shapeshift into bears in a time of great danger. Meanwhile, her mother, who converted into Judaism, is from an ancient family of swan-shifters. Her mother confesses that Laya has a different father from Liba, and that's why she's a swan-shifter. Apparently, at some point, their mother's swan clan may come looking for Laya, and her parents task her with keeping her sister safe. Liba, unfortunately, notices her body trying to transform into a bear at any time she gets upset, and also struggles with her growing feelings for the butcher's son, Dovid. While he is also Jewish, not an unbeliever like the wicked Hovlin boys, Liba isn't optimistic that their father will find him a suitable husband for her, especially once the secrets about the bear-shifting are revealed. Who would want a woman who turns into a giant bear?

While Jews and Christians have lived peacefully and harmoniously side by side in the village for decades, there are unhappy mutterings and whispers the longer the Hovlins stay in town and ply their wares. A young woman goes missing and is found in the orchard of a Jewish family, drained of blood. Later a young man is found, also drained of blood. There are rumours that they were killed by Jews and the blood used for sinister things in their religious ceremonies. Liba is appalled, and also more and more worried about her sister, who eats nothing but fruit and seems obsessed with her slightly sinister non-Jewish suitor. There are also stories about big bears in the woods (could they have killed the drained victims?).

Using shapeshifting as a metaphor for puberty isn't exactly anything new, I remember it being a very obvious comparison drawn by the horror movie Ginger Snaps. Feeling like you're not entirely in control of your body, having strange and uncontrollable urges, being worried that you're going to do something stupid - this is all part of being a teenager (I work surrounded by them all day and am so grateful I'm decades past my own teen years). Of course, Liba and Laya have different cravings and urges, yet seem to spend almost more time worrying about the other than they do themselves (although Liba naturally fears turning into a big bear and mauling everyone she holds dear). 

There was a lot to like about this book, but it was also a bit slow. For reasons that I'm sure were meant to show the differences between the sisters and their general states of mind and approaches to the world, Liba's chapters are written in prose, while Laya's chapters are all in a strange kind of verse. Sadly, it seems a bit as if Ms. Rossner occasionally just added line breaks every so often to make it seem more 'poetic', while the overall effect is more that the pages and pages of verse in her chapters quickly get difficult to read. 

The mix of fiction highlighting actual historical events, like the persecution and eradication of Jews in turn of the century Eastern Europe with fantastical fairy tale inspired characters and fates was an interesting one. So many books, even historical fantasy ones, are written from a Christianity-centric viewpoint. It was both interesting and unusual to read one so well researched and steeped in Jewish culture and traditions. This was the author's debut, and I see she has another fairy tale inspired book out later this year, so I suspect I will be giving her another chance. 

Judging a book by its cover: This cover is absolutely gorgeous and so very intricate and detailed. I absolutely love how it looks like an old woodcut that's been varnished or polished to highlight certain parts of the wood. Pretty much everything that turns out to be important in the story is hinted at in the cover illustration, so it's well worth giving some time. The author specifically thanked the cover artist in the acknowledgments and I can see why.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR12 Book 53: "The Ten Thousand Doors of January" by Alix B. Harrow

Page count: 385 pages
Audio book length: 12 hrs 20 mins
Rating: 4 stars

#CBR12 Bingo: Debut

Official book description:

In a sprawling mansion filled with peculiar treasures, January Scaller is a curiosity herself. As the ward of the wealthy Mr. Locke, she feels little different from the artefacts that decorate the halls: carefully maintained, largely ignored, and utterly out of place.

Then she finds a strange book. A book that carries the scent of other worlds, and tells a tale of secret doors, of love, adventure and danger. Each page turn reveals impossible truths about the world and January discovers a story increasingly entwined with her own.

Little January Scaller is fully aware that even though she gets to wear fancy dresses and take trips to foreign locations with the rich Mr. Locke, her father's employer, she doesn't really belong in his big, sprawling mansion in Vermont. He's an old, white man, she's a little girl with dark hair and skin a brownish coppery hue. Her mother is dead and her father travels the world, risking his life and acquiring exotic treasures for Mr. Locke's collection, but is hardly ever back long enough to spend any time with his little girl. The only friend January has is the grocer's boy, Samuel Zappia, who sneaks her adventure stories to read and who she manages to get away to play with on weekends. But as Mr. Locke's ward, January is expected to behave well, and not "consort with the help". 

While on a journey with Mr. Locke to sell some artifacts, January finds a strange door in a field and manages to open it by writing about it in her journal. The door opens to a beautiful seaside village somewhere obviously different, and January finds a foreign coin, before Mr. Locke discovers her and burns both the door and her journal. He hires a strict governess to take care of January and admonishes her that she needs to stop being so wild and start behaving properly. When she's seventeen, January finds a strange book called "The Ten Thousand Doors" and the book makes her realise that she didn't imagine the incident with the strange door when she was younger, and there's a lot more mystery and adventure in the world than she imagined.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January is a remarkable debut that has been nominated for pretty much all the major genre awards (the Nebula, the Locus, the Hugo, the World Fantasy Award) and while it's a bit slow to start, it tells a story of travel and adventure, portals to other worlds, friendships, love, but also dark forces with the wish to colonise, subjugate and control, taking riches and resources to enjoy as your own. I enjoyed the book a lot, but with every piece of foreshadowing, I found that I had figured out where the story was going long before the actual reveal. There were very few real surprises for me over the course of the novel. Considering the book is about portal doors between our world and various exciting fantasy worlds, I wish we'd gotten to explore and see more of the various other worlds than we did. Some of the supporting characters, like Samuel and Helen, January's loyal friends and helpers, could also have gotten a bit more characterisation. 

Still, it's a good read with an interesting message about family and belonging, as well as condemning colonisation and the appropriation and subjugation of foreign cultures to gain wealth and riches. I liked it a lot, but I didn't love it. I'm nevertheless very interested in seeing what Alix B. Harrow writes next.

Judging a book by its cover: I'm not entirely sure what I think of this cover, it gives you very little idea what the book is about or what you might expect to meet between its pages. There's a number of colourful flowers, with elaborate keys hanging from them, and what appears to be a keyhole, or maybe a portal doorway. Considering most of the Doors in the book don't require keys of any kind, I'm not entirely sure what the cover designers were going for. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 35: "Daddy Long-Legs" by Jean Webster

Page count: 249 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars

Jerusha "Judy" Abbott is a Canadian orphan, who at 17 is still living in the orphanage, mainly because they are using her as free help. She is frequently told that she needs to keep her strong opinions and overactive imagination to herself, or nothing will come of her. She dreams of becoming a famous author and when a wealthy benefactor of the orphanage offers to send her to college on a scholarship, she is closer to achieving said dream. She doesn't know who he is, having only seen his shadow as he left the matron's office, but she knows that he is tall, and his shadow resembled a daddy long-legs. Hence, when she is told that she needs to write letters to her benefactor detailing her progress, she addresses each one to "Dear Daddy Long-Legs".

Having never had a family of her own, Judy (as she reinvents herself at college. Who can blame her for wanting to be rid of the name Jerusha?) starts imagining that Daddy Long-Legs all the relatives she's been missing. Going to college and receiving an education, Judy thrives. She loves learning, she loves improving her writing and making new friends. She never gets any replies to her letters, but the occasional gift (sometimes quite extravagant) proves that her anonymous rich benefactor reads her missives and doesn't want her to feel left out among the other girls at the college. Very occasionally, Judy will get written instructions through her benefactor's secretary, who among other things, helps find her places to spend her summers, while the other girls go home to their families.

As she grows older and her education is coming to an end, Judy becomes more and more curious about the identity of "Daddy Long-Legs" and tries to use her prodigious imagination to figure out who he might be.

I picked up this book both because Dear Mr. Knightley, which I really liked, was inspired by it (which meant that I wasn't really surprised by any of the major story beats, as they are pretty much the same) and because Forever YoungAdult and the Book Smugglers, both review sites I trust and often agree with, rated it 5 stars and called it a must-read classic. Written in 1912, I'm sure this is a beloved book to many, but whether it's because I'd just read modern book with a very similar plot, or whether I just found some aspects of the book a bit disturbing, it just didn't entirely work for me.

While Judy is rather delightful, smart, opinionated and a bit too prone to speaking (or writing) her mind before she thinks about what she's actually saying, there was something very off-putting to me about her addressing most of her letters to "Dear Daddy". Especially as based on the reviews I'd seen, I knew that there was a romantic subplot, and it was clear that she was actually going to fall in love with her benefactor, without knowing who he really was. When "Daddy" starts dictating where she spend her free time, obviously to prevent her from spending more time with her college friend's brother, it left a bad taste in my mouth. The reviewer on Forever YoungAdult points out that Judy frequently disregards the attempts at manipulations from her benefactor, and once she wins a scholarship due to her writing skill, she insists on being allowed to start paying back the money she's been given so far, not wanting to be in debt for any longer than necessary.

I don't think it was just because of just having read Dear Mr. Knightley that I figured out quickly who "Daddy Long-Legs" was. While the character seems perfectly pleasant, and has very socialist leanings for a rich person of the time, I just couldn't get over the inappropriate way he keeps trying to direct Judy's life. Judy herself, as I have already mentioned, is great. She, like the precocious orphan girl ever, Ms Anne Shirley is the reason I liked the book as much as I did. It's really not going to be a book I revisit though, and the hero, if he can be called that, did little but skeeve me out.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR6 Book 136: "Zoya" by Danielle Steel

Page count: 512 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars

Zoya Ossupov, a young noblewoman, second cousin to the Tsar himself, lives a sheltered life of luxury in St. Petersburg. When the revolution breaks out, Zoya´s grandmother, who has seen which way the wind was blowing, bundles up the many garments they´ve sown jewellery into and Zoya and they flee the country through Finland. Having lost her father, mother and elder brother in only a few days and worrying about the safety of her cousins the Romanovs, who were placed in house arrest by the revolutionaries, Zoya has to make a new life for herself in Paris with her grandmother and the one loyal servant who came with them.

Going against the express wishes of her stately grandmother, Zoya auditions with the Ballet Russe and starts supporting their little family as a ballet dancer. The only other money they have is the pittance they can get from selling their family heirlooms, in a market already flooded with Russian treasures. Zoya rejects the elderly Russian prince and the young lodger that her grandmother tries to match her with. Her grandmother wants her to be safe, Zoya wants to marry for love. She falls for an American officer, but he´s old enough to be her father and believes she would be better off without him. Only towards the end of the first World War he realises that they cannot fight their attraction, and Zoya becomes a society darling in New York.

She´s blissfully happy until the Wall Street crash, suddenly widowed with two small children to support. Once again, Zoya´s willingness to work hard sees her safe and comfortable within a few years, and eventually she even finds love again. Then the second World War arrives, and both Zoya´s new husband and son are determined to fight for their country. Will another conflict cost her more of the people she loves?

I´m pretty sure that this is the first novel I´ve ever read by Danielle Steel, and having read it, I can see both why her books are incredibly popular among some readers, and completely panned by others. I´m not going to pretend that I thought this was great literature, some of the descriptions and info dumping was a bit heavy handed and the plot was possibly a bit too packed, but it was an entertaining book and it reminded me that I´ve always found the Romanov family and their fate fascinating (even before I watched Anastasia. So it´s spurred me to add two non-fiction books about them to my TBR list and they will be part of my reading list for CBR7.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.