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WoGF Review: Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente
Sarah I. (tuulenhaiven) was one of those 7 year olds who came home from the library with a stack of books bigger than she was. Only a bit taller now, she still reads constantly, and her childhood love for dragons and space ships hasn’t waned at all. She blogs about her reading adventures and other things at www.tuulenhaiven.com.
“If the world is divided into seeing and not seeing,” Marya thought, “I shall always choose to see.”
Mmm, this book! – this is proper storytelling. Catherynne M. Valente tangles and then unwinds the threads of Russian folklore and actual history, eventually cutting a vibrant, painfully beautiful tale about love and death and marriage off of her loom.
Marya Morevna sits in a second floor window that overlooks a street that used to be known as Gorokhovaya (just as Petrograd was once called St. Petersburg) and watches a rook, and then a plover, and then a shrike fall out of a tree and turn into handsome young men. These young men marry her three older sisters, and Marya is left with a complex secret, having ‘seen the world naked, caught out‘. As she waits for her own bird to fall out of a tree and come to claim her, Marya reads Pushkin, meets the Stalinist house elves that live behind the stove, and brushes her long dark hair with a silver comb.
