A review by hannahstohelit
The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke

adventurous mysterious fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? N/A
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

I'm a huge fan of Clarke and I think I wanted to like this more than I did...? It kind of felt like she had the idea for this, built it up, and then lost patience and just ended it, hoping that her afterword on her inspirations would fill in some missing gaps. I love Clarke's short stories in The Ladies of Grace Adieu, which like this one are set in the world of JSMN (one of my favorite books of all time) and had been hoping that this would be something like those, but her narrative arcs are generally really good in those and I found this to just kind of... happen. 

It's interesting- she goes into her inspiration for the story being the songs of Kate Bush- but honestly, when I read it it felt to me more like the great Roald Dahl short story 
The Boy Who Talked To Animals
. Surely Dahl is not the only person before Clarke to come up with the concept of
a human leaving the human world for the natural world to be with an animal
, but there were a lot of similarities for me and, to me, that story left much more of an impact, possibly because it was written from the point of view of an outsider and depicted
the impact of the boy's departure on his parents
. This just kind of ended, and Merowdis never really felt like a real person- in TBWTTA I'm not sure if the boy did, but everyone else at the resort did, which if anything
just made the ending where he vanishes seem even more poignant and mysterious
. If anything, the animals are the ones who have the most interesting roles, but they (and soon Ysolde) largely disappear from the narrative at the end after Merowdis's decision and so it just kind of... happens. Maybe the book is right that it's hard to have patience with saints- they just up and do things for whatever reason they have and we don't get much opportunity for a story resolution.