Natalia

GRR gets 5 stars for atmosphere (steamboats on the Mississippi!) and 3 stars for the plot. It was good, especially at the beginning, but my enthusiasm fizzled out after the first encounter with the bad guys. I also liked how GRR played with the vampire myth - it was an interesting take.

This story is told by Elizabeth, a woman who was involved with a murderer (Bell) who was just released from prison. As the story unfolds, we learn about the events that got her locked away and in doing so Elizabeth reveals her obsession with Bell. She doesn't reveal the victim until the end, which kept me in suspense, but I became frustrated with her dropping hints and refusing to follow through - there's a lot of "if I had only known" and "so I thought" and "I believed her at the time" etc. I wanted to like this book, but the narrator's meandering style did not work for me. Also, she and the other characters were hard to relate to. I guess I was expecting more suspense. I'd imagine if I'd read The Wings of the Dove before this, I would have put the book down midway (there were a lot of references to it in the book and when I looked it up at the end, I found that the plots are pretty similar).

Rest assured that C Pam Zhang knows the meaning of the word longing, which she explores from multiple angles in this prescient and evocative novella. It's about desire, desperation, greed, and guilt. I went in knowing almost nothing about the plot and enjoyed it a lot.

Whipple serves a bitter slice of life to her characters, but to this reader her phrasing couldn’t be sweeter.

Her prose is insightful and restrained and captivating. I’ve been searching for her books for a long time and I was recently delighted to learn that Persephone Books now offers a few of her titles as audiobooks. Of course I bought all them. This is the first one I’ve listened to and Susan Wooldridge’s narration is perfect.

I didn’t know much about this book going in and I won’t summarize the plot here. If you like realism, if you like character-driven stories, if you feel things deeply and are curious about the inner lives of others, if you want to be attuned to the poetry of everyday events, then you should give this book a try.

I started out liking this story, but once the protagonist (Ben) became an adult I found myself speed-reading. Not in a "can't want to see what happens" kind of way, but in an "hurry up and get to the good stuff" kind of way, which means I'm not enjoying myself. To explain why I’m losing interest, I’d first point to the dialogue between the main characters - why is it so mundane, so shallow? We see a little bit into the minds of Ben and Ellen on their own, but when they are together, instead of talking about Ben’s past, his aunt’s death, their feelings about moving, Ellen’s experience with workplace sexism (all of which could be useful for building tension between them, fleshing our their personalities, and so forth) - we hear them murmuring to the kids, we hear their bedroom banter, we hear them talking about the book they’re writing. Who cares? Because none of this seems to relate to the mysterious frost monster / snow ghost / ice demon or whatever malevolent force the book is ostensibly about. I’m not even seeing much foreshadowing of family conflict, which I was sort of expecting. But then again, I’m speed-reading, and maybe I missed something. Whatever the case, the length of my TBR list is too long to justify pursuing this one. Sorry, Mr. Campbell. DNF.