torts 's review for:

Winter Rose by Patricia A. McKillip

3.0

---

Reading this book was rather like having a weird and confusing dream. I'm pretty sure this author would be rather adept at transcribing dreams, because her writing style is so flowy and vague while remaining somehow vivid. But kind of boring. And sometimes I hate all of her characters. I'm not certain if her writing seems vague to me because I tend to skim it, or if she's intentionally vague so that her books can be re-readable or have a wider appeal or just be confusing. Sometimes I wondered if her confusing writing meant that she was uncertain as to what she wanted to say and decided it'd sound fancy if she was just vague and let the reader decide how to interperet that vague-ness, thereby freeing her from the responsibility of actually coming up with a solid plot, or if she knows what she wants to say but just writes in such a vague and flowery way that it gets kind of lost in the reading. Also, while I like that she doesn't beat you over the head with the protagonist's revalations and how she arrived at them (unlike some authors *cough cough dan brown*), sometimes I got severely lost and needed to re-read a paragraph just to see what she was hinting at. Which I guess is good, because this book lends itself to re-reading. But it's kind of not good because I felt like not too much actually happened in the story...and it was all so dream-like and strange that it kind of didn't feel like I really read the book...especially cuz I read it at night, so it's like...maybe I dreamed it. Trippy.