Anna Kashina, Ivan and Marya (Drollerie Press, 2010)
When Ivan and Marya was offered up for review, I read the first three sample pages and loved them. Beginning with the striking statement of: "I stood beside my father and watched the girl drown," the sample had me hooked. The opening scene, with Marya as narrator, describes the ritual drowning sacrifice of a young maiden in order to prolong the life of Marya's father, Tzar Kashchey. Marya is set up as a character completely under her immortal father's influence; the world is established as an early Russia where the not-nice fairy tales are real. There's a dark tone from the start, and a nice hand with description: "The splashing she made could have soaked a flock of wild geese to the bone." It's obvious Anna Kashina knows how to write well, and that this is not her first attempt: in fact, it's her second published book in English, and she has several short pieces to her credit, as well as multiple novels written in German and in Russian.
On receiving the ebook, I found the cover to be overwhelmingly blue, except for the white-robed, white-winged figure of Marya in the foreground. A black raven is to Marya's left, an enormous wolf to her right. A strong light behind Marya casts her body into stark and rather creepy relief through the robe without affecting anything else in the nearly monotone scene.
Point of view changes in each chapter, switching between Marya, a peasant boy Ivan (nicknamed Ivan the Fool), and Ivan's advisor Wolf (literally a giant, talking wolf). Marya is presented in first person, while Ivan and Wolf are in third; the switch from intimate to more distanced point of view was difficult to enjoy. A more serious problem was that I very quickly began disliking Marya. She is, throughout, a very cold-hearted and passive character, whose only real actions are within the bounds of what her father permits. Even at the end scene, she sits around listening to other people talk, and doesn't move to act in any way.
Ivan is a more active character, and somewhat more likeable. In the first section of his story, Ivan listens as a villager argues that he shouldn't tell Ivan anything, for Ivan's own good. When Ivan leaves the village, he meets up with his mentor, Wolf. Wolf is a cranky, cantankerous character, who berates Ivan as a fool and idiot even as he expects the boy to go through outrageously courageous quests, withholding information for no apparent reason along the way. Ivan isn't a particularly special hero, despite occasional references to prophecy and a royal lineage; he's merely the latest pawn in a series of attempts by Wolf to destroy Marya's father (the reason for Wolf's vendetta is also not revealed until the end of the book).
"He's not like the others," Wolf says, and seems to think that Ivan's innocent, "foolish" reasoning process actually raises his chance of success. However, Wolf, and the other characters who one by one feed Ivan the information he needs to complete the quest, treat the boy with no respect and scold him for disobeying their orders. "You really know nothing," Gleb the herb man declares. Wolf, at one point, is described as being "glad to see the horror in Ivan's eyes. It looked like he'd managed to teach the boy proper respect after all." Another time, Wolf declares, "You're meat, boy. I'd be better off finding myself another hero. A real one, this time." Nobody even uses his name; it's always "boy" or "lad".
The action jumps across gaps that I wish had been filled in: for example, Ivan leaves the village, meets Wolf, and goes off to battle wits with an evil swamp spirit, without a word of why he's doing so. Turns out he's seeking a magic net in order to trap a magical bird; why he needs to trap the bird isn't explained, and the implication I saw in previous scenes is that he's aiming to trap Marya in her dove form. The trap scene itself is skipped over completely, moving Ivan from his success in winning the net directly into staring at the bird in the net. ("The net had worked. He'd expected more.") The bird itself is not fully described, except as a "dark shape" and, more often, as "the creature." It's clearly not a female, and it's clearly not a dove. Its real identity isn't revealed until much later in the book.
The important bits of the conversation with the bird are skipped over completely; the chapter ends with "You're not as daft as you look, boy. Now, listen." The next scene is of Marya finding Ivan in her bedroom, presumably due to information the bird gave up. She wants to like him; he's certainly different from all the other men she's known. But it's not allowed; Tzar Kashchey has brutally trained Marya to have sex with strangers whenever she finds herself interested in a real suitor. She can't be allowed to love, after all. She's the Mistress of the Sacrifice. Any soft feelings must be destroyed immediately.
Overall, the book shows a deft touch with description, and a love of folktale and myth; Baba Yaga is in this book, as is Leshy, an evil wood spirit. A twisted, sacrifice-based version of worshiping Kupalo (a fertility god) is brought into vivid horribleness, as is the Tzar's essentially incestuous relationship with Marya. A long poem in the beginning is interesting and is nicely woven throughout the story as both hint and plot point.
The story of Marya changing into a woman who allows herself to love, of an evil man being destroyed, and of Ivan battling through a profound lack of support from his own mentor, Wolf, to complete a quest Wolf talked him into, could have been a remarkably powerful one. There's a sense of real potential in this novel, held back by a tendency to stay superficial and aloofly mysterious rather than seriously digging in to the characters and issues presented. Compared to the promise shown in the first few pages, the bulk of Ivan and Marya fell disappointingly flat for me. I will keep an eye out for new English books by this author, with my fingers crossed in hopes of more and better work coming out some time soon.
Ivan and Marya is available in Adobe PDF, EPUB, Mobi/Kindle, Nook, and Sony formats.
The Drollerie Press web site may be found here and the author's web site is here.
