Judith Clarke

Clementine thinks her cousin Fan is everything that she could never be: beautiful, imaginative, wild. The girls promise to be best friends and sisters after the summer is over, but Clementine's life in the city is different from Fan's life in dusty Lake Conapaira. And Fan is looking for something, though neither she nor Clementine understands what it is. Printz Honor Winner Judith Clarke delivers a compassionate, compelling novel with the story of a friendship between two young women, and of the small tragedies that tear them apart from each other, and from themselves.

The Winds of Heaven

Jessica 

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DNF @ 85%. As always, taste is subjective and what doesn't work for me could very well work for you. This in no way defines the author or the novel, and you should always form your own opinion of a novel based on your experience with it, not mine. 

My experience with The Winds of Heaven was complicated and simple all at one. I've spent 7 or 8 years going back and forth on this book. It lingered in the back of my mind for many of the years in between, but it just didn't click with me each time I picked it up or sat it down. There are probably hundreds of texts between me and a few friends of me saying that I'd come back to this book to give it another chance in the future. 

At the end of 2018, I finally picked it up again and gave it another try. I just couldn't get into it. It's not that Judith Clarke isn't a great writer (I have a lot to say about the prose of The Winds of Heaven and it's all good) it's just that this story wasn't for me and I could not, for the life of me, connect with it. 

In some ways, I had it in my mind that this was going to be a more in depth contemplation of its many central plots. I'd expected V.C. Andrews and Lurlene McDaniel, only more drawn out and in detail. There were times when I felt this way about it, and maybe this is why it ultimately didn't work out for me: I'm just no longer interested in this sort of book. 

The Winds of Heaven just left me feeling underwhelmed and there was no going around it--I think that it has a beautiful writing style and that Clarke created something that worked fantastically for others, but fell short for me. I've finally put it down, for good, and delivered it to a local Free Little Library in the hopes that it'll connect with another reader.

The Winds of Heaven

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