The Bear and the Nightingale

You don't have to know and love Russian folklore to appreciate Arden's fabulist—and fabulous—debut novel, which tells the story of how Vasilisa Petrovna, a village girl with royal bloodlines and more mysterious, magical antecedents, saves her corner of medieval Russia's wild north and effectively all humankind. At her rich boyar father's house, little Vasilisa delights in her old nurse's tales about Morozko, the death-god, the frost-king, who spares a maiden unafraid of him. Vasilisa, whose mother died in childbirth, runs wild as a child and cannot be reined in by her God-fearing new stepmother, brought from Moscow and terrified because she sees—and resists—her new home's house spirits. Vasilisa has befriended them and the woodland spirits, but the arrogant new priest inveighs fiercely against the old beliefs, and the ever-helpful spirits weaken as the fearful villagers stop leaving them gifts. Soon, cold, starvation, and death creep into the community, and Vasilisa must battle the raging bear loosed by the villagers' perfidy and representing a fate worse than death. In fact, the frost-king, death himself, echoes the legendary stories by helping her.