Name: Winter's Tale
ISBN: 9780156031196

Mark Helprin

When master mechanic Peter Lake attempts to rob a mansion on the Upper West Side, he is caught by young Beverly Penn, the terminally ill daughter of the house, and their subsequent love sends Peter on a desperate personal journey. Reissue.

Winter's Tale

M. Sosotris

I'm not sure what to think.

When Helprin is describing snow, ice, horses, light, clouds, and things made of gold, he is arresting and lush, and gorgeous, and a lot of fun to read. 

You will notice that few of these things have to do with the plot.

Peter Lake is a wonderful protagonist (if he even is the protagonist...). Unfortunately, he's gone for over 300 pages because the plot has to wander off into a million other directions and bring in richly described characters that, ultimately, have little to do with the main plot. The love story described in the book's blurb actually exists only in a few chapters near the beginning. The rest is a whole lot of stuff having to do with flying horses, snow, inexplicable time travel, snow, Mary Poppins-esque magic, snow, rainbow bridges, snow, politics, snow, and cartoonish fight scenes. And also snow.

I realize that my inability to follow the plot may not be the fault of the author. Magic realism is a way to blend the fantastic and the quotidian in such a way that the world can be experienced anew if one just avoids asking "why?" I'm reminded of a great scene in Laura Esquivel's [b:Like Water for Chocolate|6952|Like Water for Chocolate|Laura Esquivel|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388537473s/6952.jpg|1172473] which features a cyclone of hens. It doesn't matter how or why it happens, it just matters that a hen cyclone is needed at that moment. It is to be enjoyed, but not explained, like a Salvador Dali painting.

Fans of fantasy or sci-fi will hate this book because there are no info-dumps in the classic sense. When someone says they want to build a golden room made up of light, there is no technobabble explaining how the quantum flux inhibitor will be rerouted into the transidyne coupler in order to give the photons a solid appearance (or whatever). It just is because why not? And for this reason, the main thrust of the plot, especially in the last 200 pages, can be very hard to figure out because things happen just because and the characters seem to know what's going on even though you don't. Personally, I got so lost that it was hard to follow what was happening, but I may re-read this book again sometime and see if I can get more out of it. I feel that, like [b:Moby-Dick|2388|Moby-Dick|Jan Needle|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388729715s/2388.jpg|40862486], this book is best read quickly over a few days instead of in fits and starts over several months. I read three other books while reading this one because I kept getting bogged down and had to go frolic around in simpler books (Thank you, Dan Brown).

Overall, the language is very pretty, but the ornateness gets a bit heavy at times, sort of like a chocolate cake that is so festooned with fondant flowers and curlicues that one can't even make out the taste of the cake itself. I think Helprin could have benefited from a more streamlined plot that focused on Peter Lake and Beverly's story and left richly written, but unneeded characters like Jesse the hapless mountain man and Hardesty Maratta, the, uh, keeper of the gold thing that's important somehow, to other stories.

To be honest, I would have been OK with a book featuring Athansor the supernatural white horse as a protagonist. I'm not really a horse fellow, but every scene with Athansor doing anything was a scene where I would slow down and really savor it. 

Read this book if you like pretty language and a fairy tale aesthetic, but don't read this if you saw the movie and wanted to read the "novelization." Also, don't ever see the movie. Ever.

A breathtaking novel by the author of "A Soldier of the Great War," this is a book about the beauty and complexity of the human soul, about God, love, and justice. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Colton Ray

When I first read this book 4 years ago, I appreciated the story, but didn't enjoy actually reading the thing, and stuck it with a frustrated 2-star rating. This winter, I decided to give it another chance and had a much better experience. Sure, I still don't technically 'get it.' Sure it's overwritten and baggy and full of pseudo-mystical mumbo-jumbo about love and light and souls. Sure, there's cheesy insta-romance and everyone is dashingly handsome or demurely beautiful. But there's something to be said about the utter sincerity of this enormous epic about New York City that spans the breadth of a century and encompasses time-traveling burglars, rainbow bridges to the stars, flying horses, magical resurrections, Y2K, gang wars, and Armageddon into one gigantic tome. Helprin assembles a cast of almost fifteen main characters, each with their own plot lines and goals that intersect and collide from the 1890s to the 1990s. While it drags at times like slogging through waist-deep snow, there are enough moments of stark beauty to make it worth the while of anyone interested.

Benjamin Erwin

An amazing combination of magical realism and moral commentary. Although written 26 years ago, it speaks to the times we're in now. This will most likely be my number 1 suggested book for quite a while.

Barry Hess

From a review out there: “You’re either going to hate it or you’re going to love it, but either way you’re going to feel something.”

That’s probably sort of right. I mean I’d stop short of saying I loved it. I adored many parts of it. And I was not real happy with other parts. I could see why many, or even most, people would hate it. It’s a big book and a time commitment, so you hope to not have to equivocate.

So I’ll say I enjoyed it. Parts of it will stick with me for a long time. I’m glad I read it. And I’m not going to recommend it to anyone. :)

Melody Izard

This was a leftover “Ginnie Jones” recommendation. If you’ve no idea who Ginnie was go to  this thread if you are curious. 
I was enchanted with the opening story. We’re introduced to Peter Lake and the transformed milk-cart horse, Athansor. We get the love story of Peter and Beverly Penn. We glimpse an early version of New York with mythical magical things stirred in for fun. The gangsters rollick. The icy, icy landscape enchants. The humor is lame – but there is a bit of humor. Then things start to drag. Halprin’s dreamscape language still is captivating. But the lame humor crops up more and more and is sometimes startling. Yes, I was startled! – at least once by just entirely too much slap-stick stuff tucked away in the ice. But I think I needed to be startled because I kept looking for that mood set in the beginning and it just wasn’t going to happen. Ginnie – I think your review was just too captivating. Of course it’s been deleted now – so I can’t look at it to see what it was you said about it that made me expect too much from Peter and his friends. But I remember thinking this would become one of my all-time favorites and in hind-site that was just a set-up for disappointment.

Movie Tie-In Edition

Winter's tale

Neveen Badr

I can't wait to read this book. Even for the pain, the violence and over age scen; I want to read it so bad because it marks your soul like no other book shall do. It's time to carry a dark complex mark from each page you read over every blood cell that runs over my body until all bind inside my heart just to make me change.

Winter's Tale

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