i just ...hate ...everything about this. this is my second book by valente, the first was the refrigerator monologues and this book could not possibly be more different than that. this book is just ...ok, imagine if twilight [perhaps the most popular abusive 'love story' featuring an immortal asshole and a teenage girl of our time] was written with such excessive purple prose and flowery metaphors that everyone sat around praising it for every tiny thing while you were just sitting here going ???? because that's how i feel about this book. 
 i want to start by saying that i didn't really know the backstory of this legend going in. i'm not very familiar with russian folklore and if you are in the same boat i don't really recommend this as a place to start. it feels like she just threw a bunch of random things together but it's never really explained and none of it actually makes sense together. but of course we've got two ~deep~ metaphors in every sentence so that makes it meaningful somehow. anyway i have seen some reviews on here discussing the original legend and how marya was actually a warrior queen in had a lot more agency etc etc which really just brings me to my next point: 
 why on earth do we need another creepy child grooming "romance" between an immortal god basically and a teenage girl, especially if that's not how the story was in the first place? i guess it would be different if it was portrayed as being creepy and toxic but ...well, i'm not really sure 'endorses' is the right word because the entire book just seems far too bland and plotless to say that valente endorses their relationship, but she does seem to just present it as like 'oh well that's just the way things are'. 
 there's a lot of really fucked up views on marriage and relationships in here and while i don't think those are necessarily opinions the author holds in real life, i also don't think she did enough in the text of the actual book to make that clear, at least judging by all the people who read this book and ~ship marya and koschei so much~. can i really blame the author for the actions of her fans like this? on the one hand no because she can't control what they do obviously, but on the other hand if she wrote the story as being more 'obviously' abusive then i feel like it wouldn't be such an issue. 
 if you want more details on the abuse etc i would recommend reading some of the top 1 star reviews on here because i'm just done now. i just hated it. i hated all the characters and i hated the 'plot' and now i have to go think long and hard whether i want to keep the rest of her books on my tbr because i don't want to get stuck in something like this again.