THE BEAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE is the first part in a trilogy by Katherine Arden, based upon Russian folklore and set in medieval times. In contrast to the majority of 21st-century fantasy and SF novels I've read in recent years, this one is distinguished by a strong interaction of both plot and characterization.
Most of the action takes place in a compound near a rural village, where the local boyar ("lord") Pyotr Vladimirovich ministers to the people under his beneficent rule. Arden devotes almost as much time to describing the members of Pytor's family as one would see in one of the classic Russian novels of the 19th century, but the one family member crucial to the story is Pyotr's daughter Vasya (loosely based on a character from Russian folklore, one Vasilisa).
Though the village, like the rest of Russia, subscribed to the Orthodox Christian faith, old pagan ways are covertly observed by the peasants, and Vasya herself finds that she has a talent for seeing the miniscule sprites that inhabit the house and stable. She grows to womanhood while her sisters and brothers are maneuvered into marriages that are good for the family's betterment. In addition, circumstances force her widowed father to make a second marriage to a high-placed royal named Anna, who becomes something of an "evil stepmother" to Vasya. However, Vasya's main opponent is the "Bear" of the title, a malignant entity that feeds on fear and seeks to fill human hearts with terror. The Bear subverts an overly gullible Christian monk, thereby using Christian ethics to reduce the power of the house-spirits-- thus placing mortals within the Bear's control.
Though the Bear is Vasya's principal opponent-- she even summons the various spirits of house and forest against the evil force near the climax-- the Bear himself is not that well defined. Arden does much better in depicting the chancy relationship between the young proto-witch and Morozhko, the spirit of winter and death, and brother to the Bear-spirit. Arden certainly patterned the bulk of NIGHTINGALE after various Russian tales of "Father Frost," and some of her other conceptions seem more derivative of modern fantasy-tropes. Incidentally, the "nightingale" of the title is a bird whom Morozhko transforms into a horse that he gives to Vasya, though said bird-horse doesn't really play a big part in the novel. In all likelihood Arden wanted to foreground the horse for future stories, just like some of the details about Vasya's family aren't important here but may become important to the other two parts.
Vasya ends the novel in a non-fairy-tale manner, for she remains an independent woman at novel's end, rather than completing some romantic arc. In fact, though Arden probably did not intend to draw parallels with popular fiction about "girls and horses," it may be no coincidence that though Vasya can talk to many types of spirits, she communes only with one type of animal: horses. Maybe a better title for the novel would have been THE WILD GIRL AND HER STABLE OF STALLIONS.
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