(For reference: I am just now at the point where Valentina tricked Luzia with the dress tear.)

I'm INCREDIBLY intrigued by Valentina's character and what Bardugo will do with it. Honestly, even moreso than I'm interested in Luzia right now.

In Ch1, the whole scene with her husband vomiting half-chewed cherries mid marital consummation on his wife's painstakingly hand-embroidered linens feels like we are so clearly being positioned to sympathize with her, but then her horrible behavior of "swooning with pleasure" about getting to complain and make her staff's lives miserable whiplashes us to the other end of how much she sucks. But if she was meant to be all villain kind of evil-stepmother vibes, I wonder why give us the sympathy to begin with?

There's just clearly a lot of dynamic in her character. The way she bullies her household screams of insecurity, but she also seems to have some surprising degree of awareness of power that is either nuanced or just keenly intuitive. Like I think she knows she doesn't truly have power herself? Even when she confronts Luzia about the burnt bread in Ch2, "Valentina had the uneasy sense of the two of them alone in this room, of the silence of the house, of her own weakness. She felt as if she'd opened up a cupboard and found a wolf." That alone is so interesting because it is simultaneously two things: (a) deeply insecure to feel intimidated from the simple challenge of eye-contact, project a perceived threat onto it, and immediately back down, (b) fairly intelligent to refuse to implicitly dismiss and underestimate Luiza's potential power just because of her position.

And what really sealed my interest in her is that I always find the writing of hungry women incredibly compelling. And Valentina is seeming to fit perfectly into that. She wants more for herself and evidently is willing to go to extremes to get it. Her going so far as to slap Luzia after orchestrating such a mess is bold as hell, and I adore the description of her in this moment: "Valentina felt breathless, frightened, as if she'd slipped her reins, as if she'd gone suddenly mad. There was nothing she might not do." I kind of want to cheer?? It is SUCH an improvement over just a couple paragraphs earlier feeling "sick with disgust" and ashamed about her desperate desire for more in her life. Because isn't that just ambition?

Idk maybe I'm wayyy off base but I feel like she and Luzia could make some pretty fascinating partners in crime. Or take each other down. Or both. And all of those possibilities sound great?