A reimagining of Baba Yaga as a demi goddess in the time of Ivan the Terrible? Yes, please!
I picked this book up on a whim when visiting my local indie bookstore at a time when I had money to burn. It looked interesting, and I always love a new take on an old witch.
The author, Olesya Salnikova Gilmore, said she steeped the story for this book in both Russian history and mythology. I know a little bit about the former and absolutely nothing about the latter.
The book is told in first person from Baba Yaga’s perspective. Her mother was a goddess and her father (whom she never knew) a human. That makes her half-mortal, which accounts for her powers and her incredible age. At the time the story takes place, she’s a few hundred years old, but looks like she’s in her 30s.
It’s not impossible to kill a Demi-goddess (or even a full goddess,) but it is more difficult than killing a human.
Nevertheless, Baba Yaga’s mother is killed while Yaga is out helping a local member of the village through an illness. She returns to find the house she shared with her mother burned to the ground with her mother inside.
At that point, Yaga decides never again to live with humans because they will never trust her, and so she can never trust them. She takes her house on chicken legs and moves to the woods where she can live alone in peace.
But it’s amazing how quickly a person’s tune will change when they need something. People might not want to live near Baba Yaga, but that doesn’t stop them from seeking her out when they get sick or want their fortune told. They don’t know how Baba Yaga does what she does, but as long as it works they don’t care.
So she mostly keeps to herself, but still does some healing, helping with childbirth, etc.
The story begins when Yaga gets a visit from the Tsaritsa, who’s convinced she’s dying, though no one knows what ails her. Yaga determines that she is being poisoned and resolves to go to the palace with her and attend to her until she can find out who’s poisoning her.
Yaga is hesitant about venturing back into the world of mortals, but she has known the Tsartisa since she was a child and is determined to help her. Also, maybe people have improved over the last few hundred years?
Unfortunately, Yaga is not able to determine who is poisoning the Tsaritsa until after it’s too late. She dies, but not before making Yaga promise to look after her two young sons. Yaga promises, but fulfilling that promise is another matter entirely, especially after the Tsar, Ivan, who was initially enamored of Yaga, turns distrustful and paranoid, throwing Yaga in prison.
Yaga is able to escape thanks to a little help from her friends, an owl and a wolf she rides like a donkey.
They meet up with Little Hen (her hut on chicken legs) in the northernmost part of Russia.
There Yaga finds some other magically inclined people to help her continue her magical education. Her mother didn’t have time to teach her enough before she left, and Yaga realizes she has been neglecting her studies by not bothering to learn anything more about magic. She decides it’s past time to remedy that.
While all this is going on, things are getting weird, and it’s probably because the gods are messing with the order of things.
Selica, the wife of the god of winter, has overthrown the god of death. She is determined to reach the human world, but in order to do so, she needs to feed on human souls to make herself more human. So, not only does she dethrone the god of death, she manipulates Ivan into living a life of war and violence to feed her need for souls.
One of the consequences of all this is that the god of winter is spending more and more time wandering the earth, which leads to longer winters and colder summers. I’m surprised Gilmore didn’t mention anything about this leading to famine, which, in turn, would have led to peasant uprisings, which no doubt would have made Selica happy.
I’m not going to spoil the ending, but there’s much more that happens afterwards. We learn about Selica’s origins, we encounter past mortals who are now immortal and what they did to attain immortality. We learn what happened to the queen’s two sons, which I found very surprising, until I remembered their fates IRL.
This book is so much fun and very well written. If you like reading about gods and goddesses messing around with mortal affairs (and mortals fighting back,) this book is for you.