The story mainly follows three young women in medieval russia. They all come from different backgrounds and have to overcome their personal obstacles. Miryem is the daughter of a moneylender, but her father isn't very good at getting the money back from the debtors. So when Miryem's mother gets very sick and they are close to starving, she decides to takes matters in her own hands. Wanda lives a poor life with her abusive father und her two brothers. Her father used to borrow money to get drunk and she is on the brink of being married away. But when Miryem knocks on their door to collect the debt, it's also a chance for her to escape this miserable life. Irina is the dauther of the Duke of Vysnia. Her father thinks her only use is being a good match for a wealthy merchant or even the tsar, but her plainness stand in the way of his ambitions. First of all, I have to say I didn't get along with the writing style at all. There were so many passages that were just sequences of main clauses with a comma and an "and" in between. It annoyed me already on page 9 and continued to be used throughout the whole book. "I stood on their doorsteps, and I brought out my list, and I told them how much they had borrowed, and what little they had paid, and how much interest they owed besides." We not only follow the three perspectives of Miryem, Irina and Wanda, but there are also passages from other people like Wanda's little brother Stepon. The problem with these many point of views is that they are all in first person and you are never told who is speaking. Sometimes I wasn't sure if Wanda or her brother was speaking and it took a while to figure out where the new scene takes place and who tells it. But the thing that annoyed me most of all was the repetition in the writing itself. I can't remember the same writing style being used in Uprooted, since there were a lot of passages, especially when magic was used, that I really loved. "[...] and first I thought it was Sergey, but then of course I knew it was not Sergey, it only looked like Sergey. Then I said, "Sergey?" and he turned around, and it was Sergey [...]" "[...] maybe I could slip into Miryem's place, but now I felt I had not really known Miryem's place. I had seen a part of it, but not all of it. This was Miryem's place too, and it was not a place for me." The first quote above is told by Stepon. I recognize that he is very young and I feel Novik did a reall good job at displaying his young voice, but it was even more repetitiv than the writing in other perspectives and thus even more annoying for me. If you read some of my other reviews, you will notice that I'm usually not the biggest critic of an author's writing. Most of the time I only recognize if a writing style really resonates with me due to its flow and beauty. I'm a huge fan of Laini Taylor's writing in Strange the Dreamer and Katherine Arden's in The Bear and the Nightingale. So the writing in Spinning Silver wasn't my cup of tea and, in my opinion, didn't transport the magic and whimsy of a fairy tale retelling very well. For me, writing is extremely important to convey atmosphere and when I'm reading a book set for the most time in winter, I want to feel the cold wind and thus experience the story on a deeper level. The story itself progresses rather slowly and in the beginning, we just follow the lives of our main characters for a while without a real plot. I personally don't mind when authors decide to take their time to set the scene and build the ground for the story to unfold. But especially in the middle part of the book I felt like Novik lost herself in decriptions of daily life that didn't contribute to the overall plot and just lenghtened the book unnecessary. In my opinion, the book could have been 100 pages shorter and wouldn't have lost any of the important plot points. This gets extremely obvious when following Wanda's perspective because her story just runs along the main storyline. One of the book's strengths are definitely the characters and the message hidden in their stories. Irina, Miryem and Wanda all find themselves in extreme situations that they manage to overcome through hard work, self-assurance and the boundless will to protect the people they love. We need more books like Spinning Silver that feature these kind of strong women! Another thing I liked about the story are the mystical winter creatures called Staryk. They are feared throughout the land because they plunder and rape just for pleasure and you can never tell where they might appear. The only signs are an ice road you can see glittering in the distance and the weird footprints of them and their reindeer-like mounts. Staryk have their own kind of logic which wasn't always easy to understand and hence even more intriguing. It made them feel distinctly different from the human protagonists and underlined their mystical heritage. I wouldn't be surprised if they are inspired by the European folklore of The Wild Hunt featured also in The Witcher. Despite the amount of criticism mentioned here, I enjoyed my time reading Spinning Silver. Contrary to the popular opinion I was a big fan of the lack of romance because the little hints at the end didn't work for me. I just have to accept that Novik's romances aren't for me. I would highly recommend picking this book up during the late autumn and winter season to get fully immersed in the setting.