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rustycreamsicle's review
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
smalltownbookmom's review
4.0
3.5 rounded up. I don’t think I was in the right mood to listen to this audiobook. It’s beautifully written and full of a cast of diverse characters. They all come together as they meet travelling as guests going to a traditional Indian wedding. Told in alternating perspectives, jumping back and forth in time and place this read more like a series of interconnected short stories. I found it hard to keep track of the characters and storylines and feel like I’m going to need to go back and read this in print to appreciate it more fully.
Much thanks to Libro.fm for my ALC!
Much thanks to Libro.fm for my ALC!
dr_christine's review
emotional
reflective
relaxing
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
manwong's review against another edition
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.5
kiki_charlatan's review
emotional
hopeful
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
chiarasbooks's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
scribepub's review against another edition
McWatt is a writer who tackles race and identity with great nuance, and from a very broad reach ... The Snow Line suggests that she has done a lifetime of thinking and reading about structural injustice … The Snow Line is about the displacement of people, the stories that never get told, the commonality of our humanity, and the ever presence of God. We don’t feel the full effect of its rare wisdom and gravitational pull until we are finished. The final pages had me in tears.
Monique Roffey, The Guardian
Vivid, rich, and melodic ... Layers of images, memories, and facts ask questions of connections, accountability, and desire — political and personal — and how we meet the complexities that make us. A beautiful read!
Olumide Popoola, author of When We Speak of Nothing
Tessa McWatt’s writing is tender, unforgettable, utterly precise. Like performing surgery on a peach.
Leone Ross, author of This One Sky Day
A profound meditation on the music that strangers in a place can make together, and on how the music of a strange place can get inside us, and change us forever. I loved the journey the book takes us on, revisiting some of the geographies readers will remember from The Far Pavilions, while the echoes of King Lear provide an undercurrent of nature’s aloofness, its potential for violence.
Preti Taneja, author of We That Are Young
An exceptional, riveting read. Tessa McWatt's rare gifts never fail to enthrall me.
Irenosen Okojie, author of Butterfly Fish
The Snow Line holds up a mirror to the ways India is reflected in today’s diaspora.
Anjali Joseph, author of Saraswati Park
Tessa McWatt’s The Snow Line reveals life in overlapping panels: consciousness, memory, scenes of violence and of untenable beauty, ‘everything dangerous enfolded into everything else.’ Her prose has Michael Ondaatje’s elliptical exactitude, Jane Gardam’s terse confidence, but it accumulates, on behalf of her characters — a young woman and an old man, friends — a singular, lingering effect. The Snow Line is a small marvel.
Padma Viswanathan, author of The Ever After of Ashwin Rao
Tessa McWatt is one of our greatest living writers. The Snow Line, her new novel, is a profound meditation on love, ageing, and what it is to be a woman of mixed racial identity and culture. Profoundly moving and epic in its scope, this book provides us with wisdom and reckoning on today’s world, one that is ecologically fragile and only just coping with a pandemic. Like all mature writers, McWatt’s range of reference is vast and her understanding of humanity plunges us into depths we all long to inhabit. She writes her characters with such intimacy we are thunderstruck by the book’s final pages. I closed this book and shed tears.
Monique Roffey, author of The Mermaid of Black Conch
Delicate and ruminative … A sympathetic and serious-minded exploration of how well-meaning individuals can abet the misery of others.
Anthony Cummins, Daily Mail
The Snow Line has wonderful moments of contemplation and compassion for the complexity of lives lived. We are reminded of the beauty of life, in the place where strangers’ lives may intersect. Throughout the book, we are transported, in our minds, to the smells, sounds, beauty, and madness of India.
Brid Conroy, Mayo News
Tessa McWatt has constructed a moving epic that rises from intimate, complex character portraits written with tenderness and precision.
Cameron Woodhead, The Sydney Morning Herald
[The Snow Line is] charming, but not cloying, intimately personal without any spurious sentimentality.
Mark Thomas, The Canberra Times
At its core … The Snow Line is a book about belonging. It conveys a message that many migrants to Australia will understand – carrying feelings of longing and displacement even as they try to carve their place in a new landscape.
Rhea L Nath, IndianLink News
In itself this is an excellent story, but it’s the way it’s told that makes the novel stand out … you’ll have to read this beautiful, subtle, keenly observed novel to see how things develop in the end.
Shiny New Books
Monique Roffey, The Guardian
Vivid, rich, and melodic ... Layers of images, memories, and facts ask questions of connections, accountability, and desire — political and personal — and how we meet the complexities that make us. A beautiful read!
Olumide Popoola, author of When We Speak of Nothing
Tessa McWatt’s writing is tender, unforgettable, utterly precise. Like performing surgery on a peach.
Leone Ross, author of This One Sky Day
A profound meditation on the music that strangers in a place can make together, and on how the music of a strange place can get inside us, and change us forever. I loved the journey the book takes us on, revisiting some of the geographies readers will remember from The Far Pavilions, while the echoes of King Lear provide an undercurrent of nature’s aloofness, its potential for violence.
Preti Taneja, author of We That Are Young
An exceptional, riveting read. Tessa McWatt's rare gifts never fail to enthrall me.
Irenosen Okojie, author of Butterfly Fish
The Snow Line holds up a mirror to the ways India is reflected in today’s diaspora.
Anjali Joseph, author of Saraswati Park
Tessa McWatt’s The Snow Line reveals life in overlapping panels: consciousness, memory, scenes of violence and of untenable beauty, ‘everything dangerous enfolded into everything else.’ Her prose has Michael Ondaatje’s elliptical exactitude, Jane Gardam’s terse confidence, but it accumulates, on behalf of her characters — a young woman and an old man, friends — a singular, lingering effect. The Snow Line is a small marvel.
Padma Viswanathan, author of The Ever After of Ashwin Rao
Tessa McWatt is one of our greatest living writers. The Snow Line, her new novel, is a profound meditation on love, ageing, and what it is to be a woman of mixed racial identity and culture. Profoundly moving and epic in its scope, this book provides us with wisdom and reckoning on today’s world, one that is ecologically fragile and only just coping with a pandemic. Like all mature writers, McWatt’s range of reference is vast and her understanding of humanity plunges us into depths we all long to inhabit. She writes her characters with such intimacy we are thunderstruck by the book’s final pages. I closed this book and shed tears.
Monique Roffey, author of The Mermaid of Black Conch
Delicate and ruminative … A sympathetic and serious-minded exploration of how well-meaning individuals can abet the misery of others.
Anthony Cummins, Daily Mail
The Snow Line has wonderful moments of contemplation and compassion for the complexity of lives lived. We are reminded of the beauty of life, in the place where strangers’ lives may intersect. Throughout the book, we are transported, in our minds, to the smells, sounds, beauty, and madness of India.
Brid Conroy, Mayo News
Tessa McWatt has constructed a moving epic that rises from intimate, complex character portraits written with tenderness and precision.
Cameron Woodhead, The Sydney Morning Herald
[The Snow Line is] charming, but not cloying, intimately personal without any spurious sentimentality.
Mark Thomas, The Canberra Times
At its core … The Snow Line is a book about belonging. It conveys a message that many migrants to Australia will understand – carrying feelings of longing and displacement even as they try to carve their place in a new landscape.
Rhea L Nath, IndianLink News
In itself this is an excellent story, but it’s the way it’s told that makes the novel stand out … you’ll have to read this beautiful, subtle, keenly observed novel to see how things develop in the end.
Shiny New Books
readingspells's review
3.0
This is a gentle tender book that kind of meanders round a plot and eventually comes to rest at some version of an ending. If you like nice resolved conclusions then this one might leave you frustrated but if you like the explorations of human stories, not remarkable ones so much as simple almost common place ones then you will enjoy this.
It definitely deals with aspects of racism and racial assumptions and also how different generational experiences inform our language and attitudes. It also deals with feelings of lost and grief both on the sense of identity and home.
The synopsis says it is about 4 characters but that is not true. It is really about Rheema and Jackson, the other two are just their to facilitate their two stories and whilst Rheema is definitely a major character really this book is mostly about Jackson.
I recently read Honor by Thrity Umrigar, also set in India, but this book definitely paints India in a much more gentle kind light than Honor. I feel like the author wants us to see the beauty and richness of the country and that was lovely but also having just read Honor I couldn't help feeling like is was a romanticised view of the country.
I will say this is an easy read. I finished it in just over a day but it just seemed to lack any real conviction and the slightly ambiguous ending for Rheema was not very satisfying.
It definitely deals with aspects of racism and racial assumptions and also how different generational experiences inform our language and attitudes. It also deals with feelings of lost and grief both on the sense of identity and home.
The synopsis says it is about 4 characters but that is not true. It is really about Rheema and Jackson, the other two are just their to facilitate their two stories and whilst Rheema is definitely a major character really this book is mostly about Jackson.
I recently read Honor by Thrity Umrigar, also set in India, but this book definitely paints India in a much more gentle kind light than Honor. I feel like the author wants us to see the beauty and richness of the country and that was lovely but also having just read Honor I couldn't help feeling like is was a romanticised view of the country.
I will say this is an easy read. I finished it in just over a day but it just seemed to lack any real conviction and the slightly ambiguous ending for Rheema was not very satisfying.
spiritoflibrarian's review
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5