The characters grabbed me, even the quippy professor. The story makes a little too much noise about how it doesn’t hew to the usual vague and vainglorious narratives of armed conflict, but that doesn’t change the fact that the battles pack a punch. The battles - whether they feature human or supernatural combatants - are brutal, bloody and devastating. Stendhal is famous for writing descriptions of war that actually capture its horror, but Novik deserves a place alongside him. The novel doesn’t just borrow from Polish mythology, it grows from that soil, in a way that’s both unusual and absorbing. These beasties are no joke: there’s burning flesh, foaming at the mouth, and a whole lot of other supernatural gore that’d be right at home in The Witcher.
It’s a dark fairytale, which means that there are a lot of vile beasties that come crawling out of a menacing Wood to attack the main characters. It almost makes up for the fact that the magical system isn’t particularly well-developed otherwise. It’s breath-taking, and I haven’t really read anything like it before. Novik spins elaborate, overarching metaphors, for example, the first time the two central characters do magic together: “On an impulse I tried to align our workings: I envisioned his like the water-wheel of a mill, and mine the rushing steam driving it around.” As the main character’s magical skill grows, so does the complexity of these metaphors, until each spell has the architectural grandiosity of a church, but also the earthy verdance of a greenhouse. The best passages are the ones describing the main character’s experiences performing magic. Each sentence jumps off the page, and no words ever feel wasted.
I re-read sentences because of their pure lush beauty. For a YA novel, the quality of the prose is so far above the rest of the genre as to almost eclipse it entirely. The best thing about this book is the narrative beauty of Novik’s writing.
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