king_duncan 's review for:

Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin

3.0

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This book was fascinating, though I found it very difficult to follow. It has some truly beautiful prose and some very funny and moving moments. It’s standard writing advice in fantastic fiction that you’re only “allowed” one unusual element, and this one has time travel, flying horses, 1980s millennial apocalypse/rapture angst, and a magical hidden village; and possibly all takes place in a parallel universe, though this might not have been intended, since it was written in the 80s and set (partially) in 1999. I admire Helprin's bucking of standard literary tradition, but it As I was reading, many of my friends told me they love this book, but though I mainly enjoyed it, I found it too existentially frustrating to recommend.