In the frozen Russian wild, a girl who can see the old spirits must protect her village from a waking evil — and the frost-demon drawn to her.
- Score
- 79.5
- Spice
- 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️Sweet
- POV
- third
- Ending
- HEA / HFN
Tropes
Content warnings
Curated signals, not an exhaustive guarantee.
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What readers think
Readers consistently praise Arden's stunning prose and the deeply immersive medieval Russian atmosphere — descriptions of snowbound forests, warm hearths, and lurking spirits are called spellbinding. Vasya is widely loved as a fierce, unconventional heroine who refuses the limited roles society offers her. The Slavic folklore element is singled out as genuinely fresh in a genre saturated with Celtic and Western European mythology. The main criticism is pacing: the novel builds slowly over a long childhood section before the central supernatural conflict takes shape, and the climax is felt to resolve too quickly relative to the lengthy build-up. A minority of readers also find the Christian antagonist one-dimensional.
Read it if
- · Readers who love atmosphere and prose over plot momentum
- · Fans of Slavic folklore and pagan mythology
- · Those who enjoyed Naomi Novik's Uprooted or Spinning Silver
Skip it if
- · You need a fast-paced plot from page one
- · You want romance as a central storyline rather than a distant undercurrent
- · Misogyny (historical/thematic) and off-page sexual violence are hard limits
If you liked this
- · For fans of Naomi Novik's Uprooted — lyrical prose, Slavic-adjacent folk magic, fierce heroine
- · For fans of Juliet Marillier's Daughter of the Forest — myth-soaked historical fantasy with a woman forging her own fate
- · For fans of Neil Gaiman's American Gods — old gods and spirits clashing with a modernising belief system
- · For fans of Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child — wintry Russian atmosphere, folk magic, melancholy beauty
Which dark romantasy heroine are you? Five choices in a forest that wants you dead.
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