Valkyrie

What I find hard to do after finishing a happy ending fairy tale is to adjust my brain back to the day to day flow of life, my mind is still grabbing on to new concepts too easily... Or it might be that it is still not too good at distinguishing between the real ideas of life enhancement and the fiction ones, even though they might date back to over a thousand years ago.

Not that I expected more from the book, - I expected it to be different. By the description and reviews I was picturing more battle scenes and a tale of a self-made super hero, and thank God the novel was nothing like that. After all the recent literature on women written by men, with the attempts to depict women's inner world that were - quite ridiculous, - this was finally a true to life glance at a young female's psychology, and showing thoughts and actions that did make sense.

All wrapped in Semenova's amazing style, as always.

And Soaked with her amazing vocabulary, as always.

It would not have been such a sweet fairy tale without the cornerstones of the plot being - having two brave brothers, a wise mentor, a fearless leader and eventually all your hopes and aspirations come true. Outside the books, an outsider leaves her home and family - and this is the end of the story. 

On the other hand, the Valkyrie emphasizes a great deal the need to belong: either to the family you were born into, or the family you create yourself. The objective reasons a young woman could never be fully independent in Slavik culture over a thousand years ago are obvious, and yet I have always been curious what is it like - to be an integral part of a larger community, what it feels like to belong to something much bigger than yourself...