Deathless by Catherynne M Valente
I've been on some sort of fairy tale kick lately. I'm not really a big reader of high fantasy but I do have a weakness for stories based on fairy tales or with a fairy tale setting. I don't mean fairy tales in the sense of Disney princesses, but grown-up fairy tales of old full of symbolism and ancient significance. Generally people think of the Brothers Grimm and German folklore for this sort of thing, but if you want your fairy tales really weird, my advice is to look east and read some folk tales from Russia. Deathless by American author Catherynne M Valente is based on elements of those stories, set against a backdrop of post-revolutionary Russia and the siege of Leningrad. Marya Marevna is the youngest of her sisters, beginning her life in the city known as St Petersburg and rapidly seeing it reinvented, first as Petrograd and finally Leningrad. As a child, she repeatedly witnesses young men, who have appeared first in the form of birds before assuming a human shape,
