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A review by emmalthompson85
The Sisters of the Winter Wood by Rena Rossner
2.0
I should honestly have not finished this book but I wanted it to be so good that I finished it almost out of spite that it wasn't the book I wanted. I mean, as I've seen a few other people say in reviews, it should have been my jam. Fairy tales and folklore mixed into modern fantasy is entirely what I'm about. I didn't enjoy this book, though.
To start with, as many people have pointed out, it was mis-marketed. This is a young adult story. It's literally about a teenage girl learning her own strength and taking those tentative first steps into the adult world. It couldn't be more young adult if it tried. I don't know if the choice to market it as adult came from the author or publisher but it did the book no favours. The thing is, I also read young adult and this isn't a great young adult book either.
To start with, the characters are unpredictable and flat. This is partly the writing style. This book is in first person present which is meant to evoke a sense of immediacy and intimacy, but that never happened here. I think it's a writing style thing. The author tended to just state things. For example, the character might think they're cold and hungry, which isn't really how we experience life in the first person. We notice we're cold because we find ourselves pulling our clothes tighter or reaching for a jumper. We feel hunger in the pit of our stomachs. We don't just think to ourselves 'I'm hungry'. I also noticed a little more passive voice than I would have liked. These are distancing techniques that tend to slip in when the author needs some emotional distance from the source material and I can certainly understand how the author would unconsciously distance herself from a story tangled up in the historical persecution of her people but it also pushes the reader away and ends up feeling emotionally dishonest.
But the characters suffered from more than the hesitant writing. They were inconsistent, particularly near the end. There will be spoilers in this bit to illustrate my point. So, the swan sister goes to her lover and he locks her in. She thinks that she's just exchanged one cage for another. The next time we see her, her sister is releasing her but instead of being happy to be rescued or talking to her sister she hurls abuse at her which is entirely inconsistent with what that character was thinking just a short time ago. The bear sister intentionally turns into a bear then sees her bear hand and freaks out because she's a bear and a better author might have been able to pull that off but I think really the freak out point would be when she felt her claws tear out of her flesh.
The other thing that made the characters seem unreal was they seemed to have no history. They never go and seek out the people they knew well in town before this happened and I know there's some mention of a family going missing but surely they knew more than one family? But neither of the girls seem to have any particular friends or enemies in the village, they don't talk about things that happened before the book (things that happened to their parents before they were born don't count), they feel like they started existing when the book started and that makes them feel unreal.
Getting away from character, I didn't feel the fantasy elements were particularly well integrated. Honestly, they kick in in the last fifth of the book and before that they were a poorly worked metaphor for puberty. Changing body, unusual hungers, fears of what you're becoming, it's all pretty standard. It gets a bit more overt fantasy at the end but it felt like too little too late.
The last big thing I want to talk about is the pogrom. I'm kind of reluctant to write this as I'm not Jewish and that could be colouring my reading. To my understanding, the pogroms were absolutely horrific things where non-Jewish people turned on their Jewish neighbours and murdered, raped, looted and destroyed. What made it so horrific was that it was based entirely on what non-Jewish people blamed on the Jews, not what the Jews actually did, so there was no way the Jewish community could stop it and that it was literally people who lived together and were nominally part of the same community doing these murders.
In this book, the pogrom that's brewing rates below 'does this boy like me' and 'is my sister okay' for the protagonist. It rates down there by quite a long way. This felt a little emotionally dishonest. I personally felt like, if it was going to be addressed, it needed to be a bigger part of the story. The main character solves it almost incidentally while fixing her other problems. She gets rid of the goblins that caused it but not to protect her family and not to protect her community but as a by product of her coming to save her sister. (She also gets rid of them by letting them punch her and not retaliating which, okay?) She's so far removed from the actual action of the pogrom that we get this weird scene where she sees what's happening from a distance though we've never before had any indication she could see the place this is happening from her home. And, when the pogrom comes, it's people from outside coming on boats to riot instead of people inside the community and I understand why that made it easier to deal with in a narrative sense but it doesn't feel true and kind of drops the plot for the people inside the town who were anti-Semitic earlier in the story. I would personally have liked the threat to take up more of the character's head space and for the threat to have still been internal in the town at the end. I felt that the character not focusing on this massive threat to her community but on her own love problems made her feel self-centred and made it hard to relate to her. We even get this scene where all the men are lined up and frighten off those coming to kill then that should have been really powerful but the main character wasn't even really involved in it and the pogrom was such an afterthought through to much of the book that it lacked the emotional weight it should have carried.
There are a lot of other little thing that niggle me. The sisters drop into chaos the literal second their parents leave. The mother's kind of vague warnings before she goes when there was no reason for her not to say specifically 'look, don't kiss a boy, you might turn into a bear'. Little bits like how does the transformation actually work? They seen to have bearskin and swan cloaks which are their hides but they don't seem very concerned about them? They're not mentioned in the transformation, they just seem to be there after someone transforms? Lust is a BAD THING in this. You should find a lover who looks at you with caring, not desire. And then there was the random love triangle thrown in at the last minute where she's like, well, I've been in love with Dovid randomly and completely obsessed with if he loves me over any other concern for the entire last week but maybe I want to find out what this one other guy's about. And don't even get my started on the poetry.
Overall, I probably should have given up on this book and not forced myself through it but here we are. I felt the writing, character build and world building all needed improvement. I really wanted to love this book, I was so excited to buy it, but it let me down in ways that just correctly marketing it to young adults wouldn't fix. I think ultimately it was trying to juggle too many plots and the one it ended up dropping was the one it really should, for me, have had most of its attention on.
To start with, as many people have pointed out, it was mis-marketed. This is a young adult story. It's literally about a teenage girl learning her own strength and taking those tentative first steps into the adult world. It couldn't be more young adult if it tried. I don't know if the choice to market it as adult came from the author or publisher but it did the book no favours. The thing is, I also read young adult and this isn't a great young adult book either.
To start with, the characters are unpredictable and flat. This is partly the writing style. This book is in first person present which is meant to evoke a sense of immediacy and intimacy, but that never happened here. I think it's a writing style thing. The author tended to just state things. For example, the character might think they're cold and hungry, which isn't really how we experience life in the first person. We notice we're cold because we find ourselves pulling our clothes tighter or reaching for a jumper. We feel hunger in the pit of our stomachs. We don't just think to ourselves 'I'm hungry'. I also noticed a little more passive voice than I would have liked. These are distancing techniques that tend to slip in when the author needs some emotional distance from the source material and I can certainly understand how the author would unconsciously distance herself from a story tangled up in the historical persecution of her people but it also pushes the reader away and ends up feeling emotionally dishonest.
But the characters suffered from more than the hesitant writing. They were inconsistent, particularly near the end. There will be spoilers in this bit to illustrate my point. So, the swan sister goes to her lover and he locks her in. She thinks that she's just exchanged one cage for another. The next time we see her, her sister is releasing her but instead of being happy to be rescued or talking to her sister she hurls abuse at her which is entirely inconsistent with what that character was thinking just a short time ago. The bear sister intentionally turns into a bear then sees her bear hand and freaks out because she's a bear and a better author might have been able to pull that off but I think really the freak out point would be when she felt her claws tear out of her flesh.
The other thing that made the characters seem unreal was they seemed to have no history. They never go and seek out the people they knew well in town before this happened and I know there's some mention of a family going missing but surely they knew more than one family? But neither of the girls seem to have any particular friends or enemies in the village, they don't talk about things that happened before the book (things that happened to their parents before they were born don't count), they feel like they started existing when the book started and that makes them feel unreal.
Getting away from character, I didn't feel the fantasy elements were particularly well integrated. Honestly, they kick in in the last fifth of the book and before that they were a poorly worked metaphor for puberty. Changing body, unusual hungers, fears of what you're becoming, it's all pretty standard. It gets a bit more overt fantasy at the end but it felt like too little too late.
The last big thing I want to talk about is the pogrom. I'm kind of reluctant to write this as I'm not Jewish and that could be colouring my reading. To my understanding, the pogroms were absolutely horrific things where non-Jewish people turned on their Jewish neighbours and murdered, raped, looted and destroyed. What made it so horrific was that it was based entirely on what non-Jewish people blamed on the Jews, not what the Jews actually did, so there was no way the Jewish community could stop it and that it was literally people who lived together and were nominally part of the same community doing these murders.
In this book, the pogrom that's brewing rates below 'does this boy like me' and 'is my sister okay' for the protagonist. It rates down there by quite a long way. This felt a little emotionally dishonest. I personally felt like, if it was going to be addressed, it needed to be a bigger part of the story. The main character solves it almost incidentally while fixing her other problems. She gets rid of the goblins that caused it but not to protect her family and not to protect her community but as a by product of her coming to save her sister. (She also gets rid of them by letting them punch her and not retaliating which, okay?) She's so far removed from the actual action of the pogrom that we get this weird scene where she sees what's happening from a distance though we've never before had any indication she could see the place this is happening from her home. And, when the pogrom comes, it's people from outside coming on boats to riot instead of people inside the community and I understand why that made it easier to deal with in a narrative sense but it doesn't feel true and kind of drops the plot for the people inside the town who were anti-Semitic earlier in the story. I would personally have liked the threat to take up more of the character's head space and for the threat to have still been internal in the town at the end. I felt that the character not focusing on this massive threat to her community but on her own love problems made her feel self-centred and made it hard to relate to her. We even get this scene where all the men are lined up and frighten off those coming to kill then that should have been really powerful but the main character wasn't even really involved in it and the pogrom was such an afterthought through to much of the book that it lacked the emotional weight it should have carried.
There are a lot of other little thing that niggle me. The sisters drop into chaos the literal second their parents leave. The mother's kind of vague warnings before she goes when there was no reason for her not to say specifically 'look, don't kiss a boy, you might turn into a bear'. Little bits like how does the transformation actually work? They seen to have bearskin and swan cloaks which are their hides but they don't seem very concerned about them? They're not mentioned in the transformation, they just seem to be there after someone transforms? Lust is a BAD THING in this. You should find a lover who looks at you with caring, not desire. And then there was the random love triangle thrown in at the last minute where she's like, well, I've been in love with Dovid randomly and completely obsessed with if he loves me over any other concern for the entire last week but maybe I want to find out what this one other guy's about. And don't even get my started on the poetry.
Overall, I probably should have given up on this book and not forced myself through it but here we are. I felt the writing, character build and world building all needed improvement. I really wanted to love this book, I was so excited to buy it, but it let me down in ways that just correctly marketing it to young adults wouldn't fix. I think ultimately it was trying to juggle too many plots and the one it ended up dropping was the one it really should, for me, have had most of its attention on.