After the events of the first book, it is no longer safe for Vasya to remain in her hometown so she and her magical horse Solovey end up doing what Vasya has always wanted to do, which is bucking off the sort of expectations put on daughters and female children and going off to see the wider world and explore and have all of these adventures. It does not go easy for Vasya at first because, again, as a young girl who sort of been in one village her entire life, she is woefully unprepared for The Wider World At Large. Luckily the spirit of the winter known as Morozko has an affinity for Vasya and keeps an eye out for her; he teaches her how to dress like a boy and how to hold her own in a knife fight (which is a skill that she will need to use if she is planning on masquerading as a boy and going out throughout the Wilderness). And as Vasya ends up going out on these adventures she realizes that tartars are coming in and ruining and burning Russian villages down to the ground, and the people, the *victims* of these crimes predominantly end up being women and children, and obviously as a woman and former child herself, she feels a deep affinity for these girls and wants to figure out a way to help them, even if that means going to Moscow to appeal to her cousin the Tzar and thus putting a lot of attention on herself and making it so that her status as a human woman is discoverable and the story really goes from there. 

The Girl in the Tower does everything that I want my sequels to do in that it expands on everything that was established in book one. Obviously the world gets bigger because we see more of it with Vasya's travel going out and about, we see the way that other people live. Vasya grew up quite privileged (regardless of how constrainted she was as a woman during this time and in this place); she's never been hungry, she has never been sick without there being help around, and she's never been in a place where the spirits/the cherti have been as weakened as they have in the rest of Russia by the overwhelmingly rising tide of Christianity. Obviously, around her who could see them and who worshiped them, they were very, very strong, but now she's coming across ones that can't help her as much. And on top of that, the winter is slowly giving way to spring so even Morozko's power is not as omnipresent and strong as it was in the first book. You can't really rely on him in The Girl in the Tower to get Vasya out of trouble if she needs, at least not all the time.

 On the other hand, Vasya has never seen any sort of thing quite as grand as the great city of Moscow and the enormous streets and the bazaars and the wealth of people from all walks of life. It's all very very grand to her as a pretty much Village girl from a farm. She's completely naive to the political machinations that are necessary for the powerful to survive in these sorts of situations, whether or not they are rich, whether or not they are influential, there's always sort of the noose around their neck of somebody more powerful than them who is ready to pull and take advantage and put somebody else in their place if they're not careful. 

These are things that Vasya's siblings who ended up leaving in BatN but feature heavily in this book--her older sister Olga and her older brother Sasha, who is a priest but is also sort of like a warrior priest who's traveling a lot--they know that very, very well. And so as Vasya is reintroduced to these people who she loved as a child, and who she loves still but who can't quite trust her in the same way because she's breaking all of these social rules and mores, there's a lot of clashes within this family. It doesn't make their family bond any less strong, but it does make it more on the knife's edge and teetering and dangerous for all involved parties. 

And of course if Vasya's secret of knowing about the house spirits was a small danger in the previous book, in The Girl in the Tower we recognize that the far greater threat is pretending to be a boy. The spirits are one thing, madness is one thing. To buck against a society that has very very strict rules and limitations for what women are allowed to do? That is a far more dangerous thing and that is a far more difficult thing for her to reckon with, even as her popularity and her star is on the ascent as she pretends to be Vasili Petrovich, the threat of being revealed to be herself of being Vasilisa Petrovna hangs ever more ominously above her head. 

And though I said that the cherti that Vasya interacts with and encounters in The Bear--pardon me, in The Girl in the Tower are weaker than the ones that we had witnessed before, that does not make the elements of magic any less intense and strong, which I won't elaborate on further given that it is incredibly spoilery and I feel like everyone should read these books so I don't want to spoil anyone and otherwise discourage them from picking this book up themself. 

Also the relationship between Vasya and Morozko grows in a tremendous way in this book. In the first book when Vasya is still very much a child, there is a very caring relationship for one to the other but as she matures and grows and as she becomes a little more wise to the ways of the world, the relationship between the two not only becomes deeper in the sense that she recognizes the feelings that she has for him and vice versa are not necessarily so childlike and immature in nature, but also she begins to recognize his fallibility and that she is not the only one benefiting from the two of them seeing and knowing about one another, if that makes sense. I very much enjoy both of them sort of stumbling into feelings for one another and figuring out what those mean and those incredibly charged moments that the two of them have with one another, while at the same time (because, again, spring is coming and because we are in Moscow and therefore surrounded by Christianity) Morozko is weaker and weaker and Vasya ends up having to not only save him but save herself as well. 

I feel like Vasya really becomes a woman in this book, in that before she had the wide-eyed wonder and naivete of, like, the Maiden in the fairy tale archetype way, whereas now she understands a lot more, for better or worse. And the things that she understands aren't always beautiful but they are always important.