*****. A story based in Russian folklore, it’s a fairy tale seasoned with metafiction, literary fiction and historical fiction. Reading this book at the same time as I’m reading the complete Grimms’ fairy tales, I recognized a lot of fairy-tale elements: groups of siblings, a found family of disparate friends, repetitions of phrases and events, and numbers – lots of numbers. (I imagine that the numbers and the repetition in fairy tales helped the original storytellers keep track of events.). Other elements were unfamiliar to me, as I know the folklore of western Europe better than that of the east. I loved all the fantastical elements of the story – the strange creatures, the other-worldly settings. The historical elements, not so much – though that’s the fault of the history rather than the author. The history made it depressing, especially in the latter half of the book. It didn’t have a fairy-tale happy ending; it probably couldn’t. To quote a phrase frequently used in the story, life is like that.