Started, enjoyed, but got bogged down about halfway through and did not finish. Deep, enigmatic characterization, a rich world, and interesting themes. A unique voice and wonderful imagination. The story is slow to get off the ground, and becomes quite exciting once it does, but then something happens to the pacing and the drama sort of plateaus. Really want to give this book a chance and complete it. ( )

Revised Ebook edition, edited and co-authored by J Fancher. I've not read the original version, but almost immediately in the opening sections you can feel the slight difference in emphasis that Jane adds to the work.

Plotwise this is conitnuing the tale that ended in Rusalka. Sasha, Petyor and the now not dead (hopefully this is different to un-dead but it becomes apparent that we're not quite sure) Eveshka live happily for three months, while the villain Kami Chernevog of the title lies sleeping in his briar of thorns, guarded by the ent-like tree spirits called leshys. As happily that is as two wizards can be when one of them is married to an ordinary man. Sasha now 18 but carrying the memories (ish) of 118, still feels a bit of a gooseberry between the other two, but that deosn't stop him wishing for their happiness together. Sasha is in fact a bit naive and sentimental, and eventually he starts wondering about Chernevog, and whether he is suffering, lying there trapped in magical sleep. Such doubt is fatal to the working of wizards, and as is to be expected, Chernevog wakes. Chernevog is no mere wizzard despite his appareent youth, he is a sorcerer, fully capable of bargaining pure magic into the world despite nature's limits. However all such beings have their weak points, one being their natural human limitations and the other being the creature with whom they've baragined their power. Sasha Petyor and the headstrong Evesahka find out just little they understand of the magical world around them.

Much better than the old version of Rusalka, but still far from CJC's best writing. The opening third is quite good indeed, the cahracters live, the interactions and banter are well constructed and belivable, but then the turgid woods appear again, motivations become lost, and before you all know it, it's ended. The ending did seem particularly un-CJC-like, going out in a bang, which isn't, from what I've read of her work, much int he way of Jane's style either. It remains unclear whether this was a permenant end to the dark forces in the woods, (and hence how the heros survived) or merely a temporary reprieve. Somehow I suspect the third book won't clarify matters that much.

More readable than the opening, the mental wishing magic is still intruiging, and the characters at times have the full CJC brilliance, but generally a slow paced folk tale style faerie magic that won't appeal to every reader. ( )

This one's a worthy successor to Rusalka. More that's familiar Cherryh style, including characters worrying over their choices and not knowing which characters to trust.

Spoilers below.

I thought the climax seemed more hasty than Rusalka's. Sasha & company show up, confused stuff with Draga and Eveshka happens, Draga and Chernevog end up battling it out at a distance, and it's over. I felt more of a sense of completeness at the end of Rusalka than I had from this book. Still, the writing throughout the thing was good enough that I'm happy to have read it.

Other stuff I liked. The exploration of the difference between wizardry and sorcery, though I would have liked to see more definite results from Sasha's claimed better understanding of wizardry. I was rather expecting to see a Sasha/Draga showdown, with Sasha defending himself by cooperating with the natural things that Draga was trying to change.

The characterization was, not too surprisingly, well done. It was nice to see more of Chernevog and get a plausible, "He's wrong, but understandable and isn't completely evil."

I need to see if I can get a copy of the last book in the series, Yvgenie. Interestingly, that name doesn't appear anywhere in the first two books, so my guess is that it's Peytr's and Eveshka's daughter.

In Rusalka’s sequel Chernevog, we are once again transported via historical fantasy to pre-Christian Russia with Sasha and Pyetr, who had thought their adventures were over. Sure, they were still living in an enchanted forest whose population included wizards, magical river-things, house-things, yard-things, forest spirits, banniks, and people in various states of being dead... but things had pretty much settled down, and so had Pyetr with his new wife, whom Sasha was ever dutifully trying to appease.

Sasha was not a young boy anymore, and felt out of place in the young couple’s house, and yet he would not leave his best friend Pyetr, and even if he did, there was nowhere for him to go. This, however, was not the reason Pyetr’s wife felt increasingly uncomfortable with him; nor was it because both she and Sasha were wizards, and wizards find it hard to get along together. Rather, she had a most disturbing premonition about who Sasha reminded her of more with each passing day: Uulamets, the wizard who had stifled and tormented her, and who had healed Pyetr just to use him for his own purposes. And yet, as Sasha and Pyetr looked on, she herself was becoming more and more like someone from her past.

A series of unexpected and seemingly trivial occurrences takes a cataclysmic turn, separating the three of them in a forest gone suddenly wrong. Their usual protections failing, doubts proliferate and undermine their alliances, and a most bizarre and unnerving exchange of hearts threatens Sasha and Pyetr’s friendship and the life of them all. One thing becomes resoundingly clear as they struggle to survive: once a wish has been made, it lives on, no matter if the one who made it is now dead and gone…

;)

here is a very apt quote to end with, I think:

“God,” Pyetr said. “I’m going to go talk to my horse. Books make you crazy, you know.” A motion at his head. “Thinking all those crooked little marks mean real things, that’s not sane, you know.” He waved the same hand toward the front door. “Out there is real. Don’t lose track of that.” (p.42)

and I note a beautiful wish on page 141. ( )

I respect Ms. Cherryh as a storyteller, but her narrative can be slow and she's much better with SF than with fantasy. This is a fantasy set in medieval Russia. I had a hard time really getting into it. ( )