Unlock Now The Secret History Of Moscow Scripted By Ekaterina Sedia Released Through Publication

agree with those who expected more of this book, Let me explain what I thought was wrong with it, There's lots of folklore in this book, but it has no depth or vitality, It was like a mythology cartoon, It seemed to me as if the author herself had no real connection with any of it, The way to make it real is to show us a context in which the old Gods and Goddesses had real meaning in people's lives and weren't just folklore.
Show us the way people lived with their deities, At one point, Galina asks "Was it possible to be so remote in time and circumstance that there was simply no overlap" That's exactly Sedia's problem.
She has no means of reaching or reconstructing the past, They are just quaint old stories, DNF,
Read on May,
Not my cup of tea, I am a huge fan of Slavic Myths and legends, but this book was slightly too dark and depressing, I expected more magic, more wonder, more of a fairytale feel to it, Why cruel World Why I really wanted to like this book more than I did, The idea of an underground world populated by fantastic and folklorish creatures has been done before to great success Neverwhere by Gaiman comes to mind, among many others, but I didn't find too much that was particularly distinctive or engaging about Sedia's prose.
This is set in Moscow in the's, and the goingson in the book are very tied to Russia's atmosphere of the time, That was very interesting to me, along with the various Russian fairy tale figures that flit about in underground Moscow, the underground that collects creatures and Muscovites from all eras and traps them like flies in amber.


The problem for me was the characters, I had a really hard time getting into their heads and figuring out what motivated them, Ostensibly, Galina is looking for her sister Masha, But as a reader, I don't particularly care about Masha, because she's got such a brief presence in the book, Yakov helps Galina, because he hasn't got anywhere else to go and he's pinned his identity on his being a police officer, Fyodor is stuck selling his artwork, fearing the world and loathing himself,

This was interesting, but ultimately unrewarding read, Every city contains secret places, Moscow in the tumultuouss is no different, its citizens seeking safety in a world below the streets a dark, cavernous world of magic, weeping trees, and albino jackdaws, where exiled pagan deities and faerytale creatures whisper strange tales to those who would listen.
Galina is a young woman caught, like her contemporaries, in the seeming lawlessness of the new Russia, In the midst of this chaos, her sister Masha turns into a jackdaw and flies away prompting Galina to join Yakov, a policeman investigating a rash of recent disappearances.
Their search will take them to the underground realm of hidden truths and archetypes, to find themselves caught between reality and myth, past and present, honor and betrayal.
. . the secret history of Moscow, Ova knjiga je pravi uzitak za svakog ljubitelja slovenske mitologije i ruskih bajki, Pomalo nalik Americkim bogovima, ali ipak pravo osvezenje u moru zapadnjacke fantastike, It is the early nineties in Moscow, and reality seems to be thinning and winding down along with communism, People are disappearing, transformed into birds before the eyes of their loved ones strange passages to another world are opening around the city, glimpsed in reflections and dark buildings and legends seem to be coming to life.
Three people are drawn through one of these passages: Galina, whose sister gave birth and then turned into a jackdaw Yakov, a policeman who wants to believe only in the rational and Fyodor, a drunken street artist who has a lovehate relationship with gypsies.
Which of the dark, dangerous legendary figures they meet is responsible for meddling with the world above, and how can they reset the balance between the two worlds

This book bears a superficial resemblance to such "other city" narratives as Neil Gaiman's sitelinkNeverwhere and China Miéville's sitelinkUn Lun Dun, and the publishers even got Gaiman to write a blurb for it "A lovely, disconcerting book that does for Moscow what I hope my own Neverwhere may have done to London.
. . ", but Sedia's début, besides being very unEnglish, is much more reminiscent of Gaiman's sitelinkAmerican Gods in the way it explores the dark and primeval myths that lie behind and beneath everyday

life.
This review can also be found on sitelinkmy blog

The blurb makes it sound like a relatively ordinary fantasy novel: protagonist sets out to find a disappeared loved one and discovers a magical world.
But its not quite. Usually, in these kinds of setups, the protagonists take a long time to accept that there is really something supernatural going on, Here, it takes Galina, Yakov, and Fyodor three chapters until they decide that all the disappeared people must have turned into birds and crossed through a portal that appeared in a puddle to a different world.
Then they come to the obvious conclusion that they are too large to fit through the puddleportal and that they need a larger one.
Fortunately, Fyodor knows just the place and a few pages later they are in an underworld in which they dont just meet old Russian Gods and spirits but also humans from the time of the Golden Horde, the pogroms under Alexander III, the Decembrist revolt and the Stalinist Terror who also passed through a portal and now live in this underworld.
They dont question any of those things, In fact, it doesnt take them long to discuss which spirit would be the most likely to be helpful or trust solutions that appeared to them in a dream.


And because they didnt question these things, I didnt either, Often enough I do get frustrated when characters just know things or just accept something extraordinary without complaining but here I just rolled with it.
More than once I was reminded of Peter S, Beagles sitelinkThe Innkeeper's Song, another book that doesnt bother much with complex worldbuilding or going deep into the characters motivation but I felt that it wasnt necessary for the story.
And similarly, when Galina and the others go and question a celestial cow about the missing peoples whereabouts I just shrugged and went Yeah.
Seems a reasonable thing to do,

What did bother me was that the book doesnt make much difference between the main and the side characters, Once they appear for the first time, we get their backstory of how they ended up in the underworld but each gets the same amount of detail.
It doesnt matter if the person ends up being important for the plot or just appear this once, It feels like some of the backstories are just there to give the reader a small history lesson about a certain era, I would have preferred to get to know some of the other characters better, especially since there were loose ends in some of the storylines.


I saw that a lot of people didnt enjoy the book at all and I can understand that, The just roll with itattitude wont work for everybody but for me it did and so I got a charming and magical story, Nakon trećine knjige nisam bila optimistična, Iz naslova i opisa sam očekivala jedno, početak knjige mi je najavio čudnu misteriju i ubrzan tempo i onda se odjednom sve razvodnilo.
I u tom trenu se treba vratiti i razmisliti o naslovu, jer ova knjiga je stvarno "tajna povijest moskve", priča kroz poglavlja različite kratke priče, priča o slavenskoj mitologiji, i ruskoj kulturi.
Radnja s početka je samo pokretač i neće biti tako "brza" kako se možda u početku očekuje,
Meni je knjiga divna, i iako mi nije uvijek uspjela na dugo zadržati pažnju, želim je čitati nanovo i imati internet uz sebe da googlam sve što se spominje.
Preporuka za mali odmak od zapadnjačke mitologije i kulture! Could have used better editing it felt a lot like trying to read a long Mad Lib.
Maybe I'll try it again sometime when I'm feeling more patient, as it's gotten a lot of good reviews, I really wanted to like this, but I just couldn't do it, The concept sounded fascinatingpeople turning into jackdaws, a hidden mythological underground, Russian folklorebut it was such a pain to read, Galina was obnoxious, and there wasn't enough to the other characters to give them anything, And she can't write dialogue, This was probably some of the worst dialogue I've read in a while, The prose and the descriptions of what people felt was okay, but the dialogue and even action sequences were awful, The stories, actually, were probably about the only good part, I liked Sovin's the best,

The other problem was it moved too slow and too fast at the same time, You spend the first/of the book learning the stories of the characters and the people underground, while supposedly they're on a quest to find out why people have been turning into birds, and then finally the last/dashes through that without any real explanation of WHY.
Okay, so it's the thugs, and it's Likho and Zlyden, but Sedia never gives a good reason WHY they're doing this, What do the thugs have to gain What do the demons have to gain What's the point And I don't really see how this all is reflective of Moscow and the period of glasnost.
Was this supposed to be a parable And if so, how and where

And why,