Ji Won Park’s Reviews > Winter's Tale > Status Update

Summary here: "https://www.pluggedin.com/book-review...". Unmotivated ending with meager impact. Arrogant of Helprin to think that he gave Hardesty enough presence for us to care about his daughter. The novel can be refactored into one around 200 pages -- filler characters removed, more purpose attributed to Pearly's revenge and Mead's bridge-building quest, and less (no?) deux ex machina (Athansor).

Three more "beautiful" female characters later, I'm still at a loss as to where all this is going. What kind of ending can justify pages upon pages of classic fairytale tropes spanning families, industries, and geographies? I set out to finish this monolith of a novel (~750 pages) but I'm beginning to think the time would be better spent reading computational theory...

(one paragraph to fall in love... really?), rendering this book closer in genre to surrealist caricature than fantasy romance. 2/2

Creatures and places can be as other-worldly as Helprin likes, as long as we readers are renting a place in his world through the act of reading. But not people and not the process of love. Those no writer has the license to make up. The only bridge between our world and his, they need to be at least relatable. Too bad that Helprin skimped on descriptions of the human connection... 1/2

Hate it when the girl is "beautiful" in an utterly unrealistic way. Beverly is "sensual" and "full-grown" but also a teenager having "great and obvious attributes of youth?" How does pushing the perfect-body agenda help the narrative? Enjoyed the gangs and the horse so far but the entrance of the female protagonist is sloppy and cliched at best.