{Release Day Review} The Girl in the Tower (The Winternight Trilogy #2) by Katherine Arden (@Arden_Katherine @RandomHouse)

The magical adventure begun in The Bear and the Nightingale continues as brave Vasya, now a young woman, is forced to choose between marriage or life in a convent and instead flees her home—but soon finds herself called upon to help defend the city of Moscow when it comes under siege.

Orphaned and cast out as a witch by her village, Vasya’s options are few: resign herself to life in a convent, or allow her older sister to make her a match with a Moscovite prince. Both doom her to life in a tower, cut off from the vast world she longs to explore. So instead she chooses adventure, disguising herself as a boy and riding her horse into the woods. When a battle with some bandits who have been terrorizing the countryside earns her the admiration of the Grand Prince of Moscow, she must carefully guard the secret of her gender to remain in his good graces—even as she realizes his kingdom is under threat from mysterious forces only she will be able to stop.

​The times are unlike any other.  Bandits are sweeping the villages and taking with them all of the young girls.  In their wake, they leave nothing but ashes and fields filled with the dead. 
 
Vasilisa Petrovna refuses to live her life caged by four walls of stone.  She the girl who dares to journey into the forest in the middle of the cruel winter and comes face to face with the frost-demon - Morozko.  
 
He is always there to save her when she needs him the most.  Immortal and yet completely human, he always keeps from the falling into the cold grip of death. But when she ventures into Moscow disguised as a young boy, she encounters powers beyond anything she has ever seen before. To keep those she loves from harm, she makes a deal to become the very thing that dreads.  But when the lines between mortal and magic are dissolved, she may have no other choice than to return to the place where it all began. 

“Vasya,” he said again, low and – almost ragged, into her ear.  “Perhaps I am not so wise as you would have me, for all my years in this world. I do not know what you should choose.  Every time you take one path, you must live with the memory of the other: of a life left unchosen. Decide as seems best, one course or the other; each way will have its bitter with its sweet.”

“That is not advice,” she said. The wind blew her hair against his face.
​
“It is all I have,” he said. Then he slid his fingers through her hair and kissed her.

The Girl in the Tower is fantasy at its absolute poetic best! Katherine Arden’s dream-like prose and the unforgettable heroine that she fashions in Vasya - make this installment in the Winternight Trilogy the most breathtaking yet. 
 
It’s a tale of strength and sacrifice that will have you under its frigid spell to the very end. And it will inspire you to embrace your inner female warrior…

​​“Things are or they are not, Vasya, he interrupted. If you want something, it means you do not have it, it means that you do not believe it is there. The fire is or it is not. That which you call magic is simply not allowing the world to be other than as you will it.”

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