RaveBarnes and Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog... a wackadoodle science fantasy that mixes horror, swordplay, creative profanity, space magicians, and sheer good fun. The novel lives or dies with Gideon: the spark and punch of Muir’s debut largely comes out of the tonal ping-pong between her baroque worldbuilding and the cheekily (but not incongruously) contemporary voice of her heroine. Muir catapults her reader into a fully formed universe ... Gideon is terrifically funny and easy to root for, and her plain-speaking snark and crude asides peel the varnish off the coiffured world she inhabits. As Muir shows no mercy with the necromantic technobabble, Gideon’s brawn-over-brains befuddlement allows the reader an opportunity to catch a breath and figure out what the hell is going on. On the other hand, residing in Gideon’s head can be a detriment at times: her no-effs-given attitude extends to remembering the names of her fellow characters, which makes sorting out all seven heirs and their accompanying champions a touch baffling for the first third of the novel ... As the plot picks up speed, however, almost every member of the cast becomes well-defined, interesting, and treated with a sincerity that comes almost as a surprise in a book as proudly sarcastic as this one can be ... smart, fun, and fresh, bursting with thrilling action and derring do, genuinely puzzling puzzles, lots of swears, heaps of yucky dead things, and a storm of skeletons. The wild tonal contrasts and kitchen-sink approach to both the genre and the prose somehow works in symphonic harmony, thanks to an extraordinarily likable heroine supported by Muir’s whip-sharp voice and clockwork plotting ... Consider my bags packed for wherever Muir would like to take me next.
Naomi Novik
RaveBarnes and Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy BlogSpinning Silver is billed as a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, and you can see the bones of that story poking through ... What is truly marvelous thing is that, rather than writing against these narrative expectations, Novik embraces and complicates them, leaving the well-worn framework glittering with new meaning and unexpected implications ... This is an affirming, uplifting, multilayered, and wholly original novel, filled with indomitable women ... a story I will hold closely in my heart for a long time.
