The Bear and the Nightingale

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden Book Review

This book is so different from what I would normally read. 

I was browsing the shelves at Barnes and Noble as I’m prone to do when I picked up a YA book with a beautiful cover. I don’t recall what the book was, but I decided to check out the reviews for it on Goodreads to determine whether I should purchase it or not. 

On Goodreads, the overwhelming statement being made about this forgotten YA book was that it was the poor man’s version of The Bear and the Nightingale. 

Intrigued, I wandered a shelf or two over until I found The Bear and the Nightingale itself and decided to buy it. The Bear and the Nightingale at its core is a novel steeped in Russian folklore. It tells the story of Vasilisa Petrovna, a young girl with the powers to see spirits and otherworldly creatures. 

Starting from Vasya’s birth up until she’s on the brink of womanhood, you learn about Vasya’s mother Marina, who dies in childbirth, all of Vasya’s siblings, her father, Pyotr, and their small Russian village on the outskirts of metropolitan cities like Moscow and Vladimir. 

The plot revolves around Vasya’s deep connection with the spirits and guardians that live in and around her home and the disturbance that shakes them and the village with the arrival of a priest, Konstantin Nikonovich. 

Father Konstantin thinks that Vasya’s village is backwards for their savage reverence towards the old gods and sets the village and its people on a path of devoted fear and cruel judgment. 

Soon enough, everyone thinks Vasya is a cursed witch and the people who once loved her now cast her aside, both out of cowardice and obedience from Father Konstantin. However, the person who hates Vasya the most is her stepmother, a righteous, pious woman who is the only other person in the village who can see the spirits. 

Unlike Vasya, who sees the creatures as guardians, Anna sees the creatures as devils out to damn her and her daughter, a curse she has borne to bear and has never been able to get rid of. 

As the village falls away from the old, traditional times, the spirits grow weak and infirm. From this fragility and vulnerability, the devil, Medved the Bear, grows stronger. With his newfound power, he turns the dead into upyrs, brings about bitterly freezing winters, dry summers, and poor harvests, cursing the people of the village slowly but surely. 

The only one who can stop Medved is his brother, Morozko, the winter king known as death himself. Teaming up with Morozko, Vasya must fight back against the evil that threatens her village, putting herself and her loved ones in perilous danger. 

I feel like there’s more to this plot and yet, this is the best summary I can come up with. At its core, The Bear and the Nightingale is a retelling of the Russian fairytale of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon.

In the fairytale (which Vasya’s nurse Dunya tells her at the beginning of the story) a witch-girl from the village comes across Morozko, who is so taken with her beauty and courage that he gives her a bountiful dowry upon her return home. 

Arden takes this classic fairytale and turns Vasya from a beautiful damsel into a fierce witch that refuses to marry, be sent off to a convent, or be shackled in any way to God or to man. 

The most astounding part of this book for me was the Russian folklore influence. Folk stories of any kind have always been fascinating and it’s always so intriguing to learn about myths and stories from other cultures.

I’ve never heard of the Frost demon and while Arden turns the story contemporary with Vasya being an independent woman, the rest of the story is steeped in Russian lore, language, and history. 

The way that Arden wrote this book reads like a fairytale. With a lot less focus on dialogue and traditional methods of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution, the book rises and falls like a fairytale would. 

It was a lot of telling not showing, which I’m usually fiercely opposed to, but in this case, it was inherently intentional. It’s as if, Dunya, Vasya’s nurse, was telling the story the whole time, from start to finish. It reads in a lyrical, poetic way, very different from other novels and a breath of fresh air for pure ingenuity. 

The characters themselves were also good. Just like in a fairytale, they don’t have the deepest of characterizations, but that’s also not the point. They’re archetypes, lessons for young ears to hear and heed.

I find it a bit strange that Vasya had the mentality of a young woman growing up in the year 2024, but it’s also forgivable. Arden wasn’t trying to create a fully functioning fairytale that’s wholly accurate. 

There are some other critiques I have, especially towards the ending. It felt like the climax came out of nowhere, with not much of a build to hit the ground running as a reader, and the death of a certain character was inexplicably vague and unimportant. 

But Arden’s decision to base Vasya’s story on a fairytale, twist it with modern sensibilities, and sprinkle in some magic and poetry—is a concoction that clearly worked as the book is a national bestseller. 

Recommendation: Overall, I enjoyed The Bear and the Nightingale. While it’s not something I would usually read, as stated at the beginning, I liked the reset. Every once in a while it’s refreshing (and needed) to get away from the typical YA love triangle or slow-burn romance, from the humdrum fantasies and the summer flings. 

It deepens my appreciation for literature, expands my horizons, and teaches me something new, which—isn’t that what we’re always looking for as readers?

Score: 7/10