Thank you NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read this book.

I’m finally reviewing this book. I’m gonna say that this is the second time picking up this ARC. This time I made it through. I didn’t really care for the story or characters I can’t tell you much of what happened. It’s about a girl named Valeria who thought her friend was dead and turns out he isn’t. Also she is betrayed by someone she thought she trusted and had to go back to where she grew up to find out she was being used by a god.

It seemed very meh I’m sad to say. It’s not for me but I’m sure there is someone out there who will like this one,

The Bright and the Pale is Jessica Rubinkowski’s debut YA novel. Inspired by Slavic mythology, this story follows Valeria, who lost her whole family 10 years ago when a dark magical hold on Knnot Mountain unleashed over her village of Ludminka. Even though everyone else was trapped in an unbreakable sheet of ice, Val was able to walk away unscathed and was taken in and raised by Luiza and the Thieves Guild. The Thieves Guild is a network of thieves and assassins. Ever since she managed to survive, she’s been on the run from the Czar, who is determined to imprison anyone who managed to escape Ludminka.

Valeria, who has to keep her hair colored or covered, had been doing odd jobs with her best friend Alik, who is also a survivor, only to have lost him a year ago during a mission gone wrong. Luiza offers Val a chance to help to overthrow the Csar who hates her people. Val is on board. She agrees to steal a valuable ore (lovite) with magical properties that might aid the Bright Champion in his fight against the Pale God. After the scheme goes wrong, Val finds herself fleeing for her life and encountering a mysterious stranger named Ivan who tells her Alik is very much alive and that he needs her help with a dangerous mission.

Clinging to the fragile hope that this could be true and that the two of them could reunite, Val agrees to aid Ivan in his mission to mine more lovite. This revelation will set off a chain of events leading Val home to Ludminka and a variety of twists, surprises and betrayals. Everyone is hiding something, and readers are left wondering who to believe along with the main character. In this world, two warring brother gods rule over the world of Strana. The Bright God is thought to bring light and warmth to the world where his brother, The Pale God, feeds on suffering. The gods have once again awakened and their champions, imbued with the powers of their patron god, will fight to secure their master’s presence in the world.

This is the first book in a high-action fantasy duology. The sequel is expected to be released Winter 2022. This novel has many Slavic elements in the story, from the power of the Czar to the idea of cosmic duality, polytheism, and history of brother gods seen in Slavic religion. The Bright & the Pale features several fierce women, including the main character, Valeria, Chinua, and Serafina. And though she’s strong, we also see a tender romance form between her and her longtime friend, Alik. The author has created a rich, vivid world where a group of people are being unjustly persecuted for an evil curse that has brought despair and poverty to an entire empire.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me a free advanced copy of this book to read and review.

Sadly I just couldn’t connect with this story and I found myself skimming a lot so I finally gave up.

This is definitely a case of, “it’s not you, it’s me.”

While I enjoyed the book it was difficult to follow and I didn't 100% love it. There was too much information coming from too many different people and it just didn't flow smoothly.

I think it's finally time to accept that I've DNF'd this book. I read half way and got distracted and never wanted to return.

Definitely suffered from a lack of world-building and the pacing was completely off. I'm not sure what the overarching problem is, or who I'm meant to root for??

I was really excited for this book because it focused on Russian mythology! I thought that this would be similar to The Bear and the Nightingale! However, the story moved at a slow pace, and I could not connect with the characters. However, the writing was very beautiful and lyrical! The novel will appeal to fans of Jessica Day George, Meghan Spooner, and Katherine Arden!

This book was like January. So excited for it to start. It is a new exciting new world, fun and different. But like January it dragged on and on. a lot of it seemed like the author felt it had t be included. The best friends were more like frenemies to maybe together.? I have high hopes for the sequel. Only because I need to know how it ends.

This book suffers greatly from pacing issues. It is WAY too much too fast and with only the most cursory worldbuilding and it's in desperate need of some better world building. Right now it's just an outline of events that seem like they make a good story but I just can't bring myself to care about any of it because the time wasn't taken to make me care about it.

I wasn't sure what to think of this book as I started reading, because I had heard mixed reviews about some major elements of the plot and character arcs.

However, the pacing and the beautiful writing style hooked me immediately. I couldn't put it down!.....Until about a third of the way through, when the plot suddenly started to sag, character arcs stalled, and the main character Valeria got stuck in a loop where she reacted to everything and everyone the exact same way. I mean, there's only so many times I can read an argument (internal or external) before I start skimming the pages looking for something new to happen.

Maybe it's just that Chosen One storylines can be really predictive, but there just....wasn't much that interested me. I predicted every development pretty easily, and the limited perspective didn't add any depth or further understanding.

In fact, many of the issues with shallow character development and flat plotlines could have been addressed if the first person present POV were changed--it was just too limited for the scope the author was trying to incorporate.

Overall, I don't regret picking up this book, but I probably won't read the sequel unless it addresses some of the issues.

Atmospheric, chilling, undeniably magical. The BRIGHT & the PALE has much to offer from a tale of friends to lovers to surprising blood-soaked revenge. Its world brims with mountain gods, a frozen village, and quest to free those locked in the chill that has gripped the place. Valeria is the main character, who's forced to lead a group of thieves to back to her village to steal lovite, but the mission rips open old wounds, ones she might not be ready to face. The story is evocative, atmospheric, and, at times, tinged with horror, but I feel the world could have been fleshed out more, and the relationship between Valeria and Alik could have been better paced. Too much time was spent dwelling on Valeria's feelings of betrayal rather than showing us the struggle between her emotions of love and betrayal.

I would recommend the BRIGHT & the PALE to anyone interested in Russian settings steeped in ancient lore with a touch of horror among the fantastical. It's gripping, vivid, and a page turner.

I liked this book far more than I thought I was going to. It leans a little into dark fantasy, even a few horror tropes, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously, going light with the worldbuilding and putting a heavy emphasis on friendship and love. There are definitely mature topics here, but overall this felt like a light and easy read, following a new tradition in YA of Russian-inspired fantasies, setting up a sequel with a dynamic ending.

Marked by her ghostly white skin and hair, Valeria is the sole survivor of a bizarre incident that swept her hometown: a deep freeze permeated the land, literally freezing the people where they stood and contaminating the land. But her hometown was at the base of a mountain that contained a valuable ore, and years later, she’s been summoned to lead a heist back into this contaminated and forbidden territory to retrieve it. What drives her is not the promise the wealth of this ore brings, but that the man leading the heist holds the debt of her long-lost best friend Alik, whom she had thought dead. But the journey there is riddled with soldiers who seek to imprison her for her survivorship, Alik is not the man she remembers, and the legends about the creatures under the mountain may have more basis in reality than Valeria had ever thought.

Much appreciated was the genre blending that happened here. This is absolutely a fantasy novel, but it utilizes a lot of horror and heist tropes in a way that I found fascinating. This book has drawn a lot of comparisons to Shadow and Bone, but it definitely felt more like Six of Crows (admittedly without the found family aspect) in terms of maturity and plotline. There’s a journey beneath the earth, spooky dream sequences, combative heist teams, and a lesbian demolitions expert. This very much feels like a book that was marketed a bit improperly; I went in expecting Russian magicians and got a gothic heist.

Almost to the contrary, the simplicity of the worldbuilding fit the story well. By not bogging us down with a lavish history or complicated magical system, we were much more effectively able to focus on the tight group dynamics. While the sequel is set up to include more magic than this one, I hope Rubinkowski still plays fast and loose with the magic rules to go deeper on the character development. I feel like a lot of fantasy (YA or otherwise) mistakes heavy worldbuilding for good writing, and this book was a good example of how leaning away from lore can make for a better story.

The one thing about this book I didn’t like the way Valeria interacts with other characters. Namely, she’s a pushover, even in the things that matter, and forgives extremely easily with little interrogation. These aren’t petty arguments or disagreements, they’re people being xenophobic and racist to her, stabbing her in the back, keeping important information from her, etc. The plot is really rapid-fire, which is normally a good thing, but I felt like the author was unwilling to give betrayals and arguments the weight they needed in an effort to keep things going. It’s really hard to take Valeria seriously as a competent assassin and strategist when she continually turns a blind eye to people betraying her.

The Bright and the Pale was a quick, thrilling read, an easily digestible YA that rightfully prioritizes its atmosphere and characters over worldbuilding. A lot of YA these days feels aimed more towards adults or much older teens, and it was really refreshing to read something I could feel comfortable recommending to a fourteen or fifteen year old without sacrificing maturity or complexity. I’m a little biased in favor of the horror tropes, but I think any dark fantasy fan will find something to like here.

Much thanks to NetGalley for providing me a copy of this book.

This book was so much fun to read. The characters were unique, likable, and complex. Valeria, the main character and voice of the book, is stubborn and reserved. I loved that she was able to carry this throughout the entire book because it allowed her to be a leader in her own life.

The weaving of mythology throughout the book was something that I love to see in writing. Rubinkowski did a great job of making the myth come alive and capture the reader. The gods had so much personality and cruelty that allowed the story to move forward and build in a natural way.

Definitely a good read and one that I will recommend to all readers that are looking for a fun, fantastical read.

Valeria wants nothing more but to please the Thieves Guild master who took her in and hid her from the government who would arrest her on site due to her race. When the guild master is taken, Valeria agrees to a deal to lead a small expedition into the same snow covered mountains that took her family away. Little did she know that her best friend Alik from the past is part of the mission and that there is no end to the betrayals and secrets everyone has been keeping from her.

I feel like this book was two different stories merged together. The first half was an angsty survival story set in a country on the verge of a revolution, where a ragtag group is braving the cold wilderness to find treasures up a mountain led by the only survivor from the region. The second half was a fantasy horror mashup, with the group trapped in a scary situation, running out of supplies and being tracked by the unknown. Seriously, the book took an unexpected turn but I really liked the direction the second half took, it was engaging and had me turning the pages to see what happened next.

Keep in mind that this is the first in a series, so be aware you will need at least one more book to get the full story. The ending was a whirlwind of danger and violence and heartbreak, showing that Valeria's journey is just getting started. Overall this was very interesting and different, equal parts emotional angst, betrayal, romance, survival, suspense, death and destruction.

⭐️⭐️⭐️🌗

Note: I received an eARC of this book to provide an honest review.

Book TW: discussion of sexual assault

Overall I enjoyed a lot of this book. It had really good, fast pacing and kept me engaged.
The section of the book in the mountain has truly tense and claustrophobic moments that were done really well. A couple moments legitimately gave me chills and made me wish I wasn’t reading in the dark.
Because this is part of a duology, there are certain aspects of the plot where I’m withholding judgement until the second book. However, there were still sometimes where a character’s choices didn’t seem to fit well for me (particularly at the end). In an unusual turn of events, I was more invested in the plot in this book than in the characters. This almost never happens. I didn’t /dislike/ the characters, to be fair. I thought most of them were fine, it was just the plot and the rapid pacing that kept me going for this book. I also really enjoyed the Russian Mythology focused world and semi-exploring the moralities of the gods and not really knowing who’s telling the truth. I think the end gave a particularly interesting set up for the next book so I’m definitely curious to see where it goes.
Overall, I think it’s a decent fantasy read and because it was such a fast read, I’d definitely consider picking up the second one when it comes out as well.

3.5 but rounded up to 4 stars!

First off, that cover is gorgeous. Seriously, this year has been filled with books with absolutely amazing covers and I am loving it. Honestly, when I first picked up "The Bright & the Pale" I expected to dive right into the story, but I ended up falling into a bit of a book slump instead and set it aside for several weeks. However, when I finally did pick it up to make myself break from this slump, I was able to fly through it rather quickly. I wasn't in love with this book but I liked it (definitely enough to read the sequel).

I know several reviews have stated that this book is a retelling of sorts, but I couldn't tell you WHAT retelling it might be so I'm not sure if it is actually a retelling? In any case, I really enjoyed the world, the writing style, and the characters - and I'm curious how it will go in the sequel considering the ending. All in all, it was a good debut!

Thank you so much for allowing me to read and review your titles.
I do appreciate it and continue to review books that I get the chance to read.
Thanks again!

I really enjoyed the winery atmosphere of this book. The author perfectly captured the frozen beauty of a winter landscape and the cold horrors it contains. The mythology was the strongest aspect of the novel, with the characters leaning more towards one-dimensional than two. The main character, Valeria, I found her to be annoying at times and I couldn't really connect with her as her decision making skills left me scratching my head.

This book based off of Russian folklore and myth was one that I was so excited for. I love mythology of all kinds so this one should have been right up my ally. But sadly this one just didn't grip me like I was hoping. I felt like the characters just didn't mesh with me at all and the story wasn't what I was looking for .