Winter's Tale

This was a strange book. I haven't seen the movie but I don't think it matches up too much.

Peter Lake and Beverly Penn have a love story that is very brief. He decides to rob her house thinking it is empty and she is alone in the house but is sick with consumption or what at least seems like consumption. They fall in love and Beverly dies soon after. The book then shifts to another time and place. Lake of the Coteries is place that cannot be accessed easily. Virginia is a young mother who decides to leave there and go into the city. She arrives in NYC and has a lot of luck in getting a job at a newspaper The Sun. There is also the story of a white stallion who keeps appearing throughout the time. He seems to be immortal and helps Peter when he needs it both in the past and in the future when he suddenly appears alive with very little memory of his past life. I would love to give this 5 stars as it is very well written, but a bit too disjointed. I enjoyed the stories of each couple and finding how they connected.

This book was a drag to get through, and finally coming out the other end I'm not even certain what kind of story it was attempting to tell. There was never a point where it officially hooked me into not wanting to put it down, it just got somewhat more intriguing after 50%—which, for a book as long as this one, took forever to get to. There were several words that I had never heard of before used frequently throughout the book, so much so that I was glad to be reading an e-book copy so I could look them up. It really added to the bogged down reading experience when I had to be pausing every few paragraphs to try and understand what I was reading. I will admit that this was chosen for the prompt "Out of your comfort zone," but historical is not necessarily a genre I hate, just one I don't dive into that often.

I thought it was going to be a romance and I assumed it would follow the same person from the beginning of the book, but about a third of the way in it starts introducing new POVs and doesn't stop introducing new ones until about halfway. It introduces characters, drops them entirely, brings in new ones, drags back some old ones, and it all became very chaotic to read. I understand why it was written that way now that I'm through with the book and looking back on it, but I only had questions upon questions while I was reading, and I feel like there could've been much more concise ways to write the story.

As I'm not sure where to put these specific gripes, I'll mention them here: the romance—or rather, the original romance—is between a 30 year old man and an 18 year old girl who decide they're in love at first sight under the strangest circumstances. I also noticed that practically every single woman who is not written to be a main or large side character is described sexually in some way, or pointed out to the reader as being a sexual creature, for more than a couple lines.

At the end of it all, I still don't understand the story. This is set in New York, with everything as it should be in real life, but there are touches of magic that seem more odd and out of place than mystical and wondrous. So many people whom are the best of the best, clouds that form a wall and eat anyone who go in, unclear messages about the dead and dying, a horse that can leap a block or two or even fly, a girl who's in a perpetual fever and soon to die who has more knowledge and wisdom than anyone in the world (implied to be because of the fevers). There are 300/900+ pages without the character you're first introduced to, which feels like an insanely long amount when he's who you first assume you're learning the story of. The "magic" is never explained, the characters only decide to accept it at one point or another. In fact, most things in the plot are never explained either, only giving a modicum of a wrap up at the very end.

There were a few parts that entertained me, but they're small, so they get to go at the end. There is a lengthy scene described where a burglar is trying to burgle a home belonging to a burglar-obsessed man, and each description of the burglar trying to get in and finding himself thwarted in this way or that is incredibly funny. A train is stuck in a blizzard, and the moment of being rescued was so heartwarming that I so desperately wanted to like the rest of the book. A man and a woman are separate tenants who share an apartment wall, and they speak to each other and fall in love long before they meet, which was also incredibly cute. But all of these scenes were just that—scenes that didn't last very long, and didn't make up for the rest of it.

I'm sure this is a book for someone out there, maybe someone who wants a world to get entirely lost in for a very long time and who doesn't have a problem suspending their disbelief, but it wasn't for me.

Rereads are always risky. Unfortunately this one went worse than anticipated. If you retain nostalgia for this title, click away from this review now. 
From when I originally read this as a teen, I remembered only a love story, when I picked it back up, I was hoping for magic and a connection to the past. My past as much as that of historical New York. Perhaps it was too high a bar to set.  Turns out the love story is much less of the framework than I recalled, unless you count the love Helprin has for winter and New York. 
No idea how much the ‘historical' New York depicted is fantasy or exaggeration, it was from time to time, the most enchanting part to read about. Immersive descriptions, the colours and lights of winter, the reader feels the season, even when reading it in late spring.
And that's about it for the positives. 
Sadly, passion for a city on this level seems a step away from the rabid passion for a nation these days labelled as nationalism/patriotism, which  feels more pejorative than virtue at this point, especially linked to an American context.
Political and economic philosophy espoused not quite my vibe: strong push for meritocracy. The plight of ‘the poor/the city of the poor' is returned to regularly, but always at a distance, feels more like a grotesque prop of disease, corruption and stupidity, not humanized by the inclusion of any one character that represents the group for more than a couple pages, usually unnamed and pitiable, soon to be destroyed, unless they do a bootstrap-style ‘getting out'. Justice as a golden abstract gets a lot of mentions but not any of the social structures or revamps which might assist ‘the poor'; I believe there was one specific negative reference to welfare. 
Reminded of Ayn Rand, not so much in the specifics, but in the general sweeping monologues that land somewhere between poetic and impenetrable, a thinly veiled platform for the author to hold forth on his views.
Also pretty heavy on that classic (ableist) fairy tale divide (to be pure and virtuous is to be beautiful, to be evil or pitiable is to be ugly).
Finding out the author is billed as a ‘conservative commentator' was not surprising. 
Seems to waffle between emphasizing the changing winds of fortune, just how quickly luck can arrive or abandon, how much more beautiful things are when their brevity and vulnerability is understood, and vaguely promising that the virtuous will eventually be rewarded. 
Dangerous to tell oneself a fairytale that ‘everything happens for a reason', that it's all part of a larger picture on a greater timescale than we can perceive, because, much like religion, it promises justice later/in the next life and not now. 
Or of course, to get justice now, you could blame the poor for the destruction of the city, burn the whole thing to the ground, costing who knows how many lives, and end as if this is just the price for a fresh start, which feels a Iittle too close to genocide for my taste.
A cast of interesting characters, decently interwoven, but a few too many with not enough time on the page to feel invested.
I found the pacing frustrating. Major plot points described in a line, scenic interstitials described in detail; irresistible cliffhanger, then hundreds of pages spent introducing other characters. Various goings on hinted at and never resolved. Spent most of the book in a state of impatience, not immersed in the plot but waiting for it to return, only briefly carried off by a beautiful or absurd  description. 
Author has a fondness for turning unorthodox lists into meandering paragraphs, and describing many things in terms of snakes. A bit too in love with finding ‘ten dollar words' or archaic words to  plump up a paragraph. 
⚠️ Touches briefly on a whole bunch of the truly awful parts of being a child in (the industrial revolution (?)) or really any time before modern protections were put in place  (yes, I recognize the limits of those protections; we'll call it room for improvement). 
Little too casual with the word ‘rape' as a descriptor in less violent settings.
That whole scene with the waitress feels a lot like romaticizing sexual harrassment, with inebriation as a cover.  😬
Sex between/sexualization of minors, passing reference to sexual relationship between clergyman and underage boys, child labour, ableism, fatphobia, animal cruelty, whiff of homophobia, SA