Here’s a short summary of Spinning Silver:
Miryem’s father is a moneylender, who’s not good at his job, and so, being the resourceful girl she is, Miryem takes up her father’s mantle. Miryem is cruel and reality-based, and she makes good money for it - better than her good-hearted, kind father anyway. However, when news spreads through the village, and a Staryk king - a king of mystical fey - finds out about her ability to “weave” silver to gold, he employs her as the new queen, making Miryem desperate to get her hands on actual magic that’ll give her powers. Meanwhile, while Miryem is away, an uneducated peasant girl called Wanda acts as Miryem’s replacement, while another person is out to get the throne of this historical-fantasy world.
Here's a short review of the novel:
For my English class, I read this book, and it wasn’t that great in my opinion. It had some good parts, elements of characters which made it cool to read. The main reason, though, I picked this book was because it was a retelling of Rumplestiltskin, and it sounded really good when I first read it. I really enjoyed the beginning though, filled with vibrant imagery that gave me visions of this cold, snowy world. Miryem was a heroine I could gladly root for - ambitious, cold, cunning… She was a weapon of clay, molded from the society and place she lived in, and I respected the author for putting some realism into this character. All in all, I still felt there was something lacking, especially since it felt like a subpar textbook that wasn’t even good in context because it was so stilted and each paragraph was about a page long and there was hardly any valuable dialogue - or any dialogue at all.