the winternight trilogy by katherine arden

You’ve probably realized by now that the more I love something, the more incoherent my thoughts get 😁 So I’ve attempted to organize this a little bit, but, realistically, you’re still going to get a lot of rambling… Review Excited Gushing – With Lots of Spoilers, Obviously If you haven’t read this series yet and any of this sounds at all intriguing to you, I highly recommend you go pick this up! It might be my favorite thing I’ve read so far this year, and it goes without saying that I gave all three books a full five-star rating.

I hope you appreciate my attempts to make this review more atmospheric by adding some pictures of my travels through Russia – this one was taken in Великий Новгород (Veliky Novgorod), and the beautiful wooden architecture helped inspire how I imagined Vasya’s village Lesnaya Zemlya.Īnyway, that’s pretty much it as far as non-spoilers go. Reading this trilogy transported me back to that trip, and also taught me so many new things about Russian history and culture! If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know that I’ve been learning Russian for more than a year now, and that going to Russia in 2019 was one of the coolest experiences in my lifetime. And, obviously, I loved how heavily inspired the series was by Russian culture.

The writing, the characters, the setting – all of it was so fleshed out, you couldn’t help but believe it was real. Her life soon becomes intricately connected to the tales she heard during her childhood, and her and her family’s lives are put in danger as things start changing in Rus’. But Vasya knows that these are more than just tales – she can see the creatures no one else can: the domovoi that lives in the oven, the vazila in the stables, the rusalka that tries to drag unsuspecting people to the depths of its lake. I completely forgot about everything that was going on around me and got lost in a tale about a girl called Vasya, who grows up at the edge of the Russian wilderness listening to fairy tales about the frost-demon that haunts the night. A fantasy trilogy set in 14th century Russia, this is exactly the type of slow, atmospheric read that makes you want to curl up in a chair with a hot drink as the weather turns cold outside. Honestly, guys, this series is everything I ever could have asked for.

The winternight trilogy by katherine arden