It felt so mixed and so I give a mixed rating and a mixed review. This book almost got five stars from me. The book has a haunting, lyrical quality to it that is captivating. No, she acted on instinct. The message seemed to be that if you were a woman you might possibly write something fine — but that there was something disabling about hele production of children. View all 6 comments. Mar 16, Helen Corcoran rated it it was amazing Shelves: Also, two weekends ago I attended a Lemonade Party that brought to mind the beautiful description of lemons, packed and foreign and sent from Italy, in this book.
I picked it because I saw it had won the Orange award, and went into it not knowing much else about it. We stared at her. It is is set in Leningrad during the first year of the siege of the city by German forces, which lasted for days from the fall of Mga on 30th August This article about a World War I novel is a stub.
This is a most enjoyable book, if not an especially deep one, a sort of Bronte meets Lawrence meets McEwan. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. Orange Prize for Fiction A Spell of Winter enchants by its poetic, pitch-perfect prose and its near-Gothic journey from dank winter into the sun.
She is abandoned many times during her life, but her resilient nature, whether through necessity or tenacity, keeps her going. I began to travel a great deal within the UK and around the world, for poetry tours and writing residences. Her loneliness and her dark search for love lead her to a place which threatens her, and only the coming war seems to break the spell.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Starting at 6th level, while you are affected by your Winter Spirit feature, a cloud of frost and snow billows around you, freezing your foes.
As a bonus action on each of your turns while you are using your Winter Spirit feature, you can force one creature within 30 feet of you to succeed on a Constitution saving throw. On a failed saving throw, the creature's movement speed is reduced by 10 feet until the end of its next turn. Beginning at 10th level, your magic is permanently touched by slippery ice.
When a creature fails its saving throw against a druid spell you cast that deals cold damage, it falls prone. The bonus cold damage granted by your Winter Spirit feature does not count as a spell dealing cold damage for this feature. By 14th level, your body permanently resembles a creature of snow and frost. You are immune to cold damage, and when a creature hits you with a melee attack, it takes cold damage equal to half of your druid level.
Sand is blowing up from the low dunes and whisking across the grass. No one will hear us coming. View all 16 comments. A Spell of Winter isn't lyrical so much as it is lulling. With the exception of a few bumbling sentences such as " Elsie shudders exaggeratedly as she goes away in the early December dusk " , Dunmore's craft exudes an easy rhythm and dips in and out of the past and present with a fluidity akin to waves gently lapping at the shore.
This tale of forbidden love, dark secrets, and intimacy that crosses into dangerous territory, never quite delivers high stakes or tension, serious threat or heartbreak. The characters are distinctly peripheral; each one demonstrates a hazy carelessness, drifting along in a fog of apathy.
Even the protagonist, Catherine, whose perspective we follow from start to finish, feels detached from her own narrative. In this regard, Catherine is passionate and damaged in a manner both moving and memorable. But I also know that two people don't always need to tell things to one another. Secrets can cross from one person to the other without words, and suddenly you find that you've always known them.
If a child was born from those two people, I wonder if it would be born knowing all their secrets, somewhere within it. Perhaps that's why I was born with such heaviness inside me. View all 4 comments. The atmosphere and setting reminded me of a couple of my favourite William Trevor novels Fools of Fortune and The Story of Lucy Gault - they share the decaying country house settings and the Anglo-Irish family settings, and they share the elegiac tone with darker overtones and the quality of the writing.
The plot describes the life of Catherine, who lives with her grandfather, her b This was the first winner of the Orange Prize now the Women's Prize for Fiction , and I found it very impressive. The plot describes the life of Catherine, who lives with her grandfather, her brother Rob and an Irish servant Kate in her grandfather's country house, which they struggle to maintain, after her mother has left her father and the family and the father has died.
Largely left to fend for themselves, Cathy's relationship with Rob becomes unhealthily close, with tragic consequences which are played out at length against the historical backdrop of the immediate pre-Great War setting. For the most part this is a beautiful book and a pleasure to read, despite a slightly melodramatic middle part. View all 3 comments. I had such a strange reaction to this book: I loved this more than anything I have read in a long time, but when I started thinking about writing this review, I had the hardest time putting my finger on why.
Its structure is a bit messy and tonally inconsistent; it doesn't really deliver anything promised on the blurb not a fault in the book itself - but I think it's bound to frustrate a lot of readers who go into expecting a mystery or a Shirley Jackson-esque haunted mansion tale ; but it rea I had such a strange reaction to this book: I loved this more than anything I have read in a long time, but when I started thinking about writing this review, I had the hardest time putting my finger on why.
Its structure is a bit messy and tonally inconsistent; it doesn't really deliver anything promised on the blurb not a fault in the book itself - but I think it's bound to frustrate a lot of readers who go into expecting a mystery or a Shirley Jackson-esque haunted mansion tale ; but it really came together for me and gave me one of the most enthralling reading experiences I have had in a while.
A Spell of Winter is a difficult book to categorize and difficult to explain without giving too much away - but it follows siblings Cathy and Rob who have spent their lives in a quasi-abandoned manor in the English countryside which belonged to their parents; their father is now dead and their mother ran off when they were young.
As adults, Cathy and Rob's relationship begins to develop into something forbidden, and it sets off a tragic chain of events that spread into the years of the First World War. This was my first Helen Dunmore, which I decided to pick up as it won the inaugural Women's Prize for Fiction back when it was known as the Orange Prize, and the first thing that struck me about it was how enchanting I found her prose. Even when you get past the arresting first sentence ' "I saw an arm fall off a man once," said Kate ' the writing itself continued to beguile - her prose is descriptive and evocative without being overly flowery; there was something distinctly reminiscent of Daphne du Maurier there, and indeed the book's setting and atmosphere called to mind Rebecca though the comparisons really do stop there.
The other reason this book came alive for me is that Cathy was such a fascinating, sympathetic, well-developed character, and the depth of emotional complexity that Dunmore was able to excavate with this book was staggering. This book is about sexuality, societal restraints, and female agency, all examined through the lens of one woman's fraught relationship with her own family inheritance. It all sounds like a rather standard female-centric historical fiction novel, but Cathy's journey and Dunmore's psychological insights took on a hard edge that subverted all of my expectations and then some.
I don't think this is the kind of book that people intensely hate - I think it's more of a 'it was fine, nothing special' for a lot of readers. So again, it's hard to recommend this enthusiastically knowing that it's bound to fall flat for a lot of people who find themselves disappointed by the anticlimactic?
But I was so utterly enchanted and riveted by this book, and I cannot wait to see what else Dunmore has to offer. Sep 06, Brianne rated it it was ok. Maybe because I have no brothers and thus no frame of reference to get suitably skeeved out by it. But whatever, neither here nor there. The trouble with this book was that it just plain loses you. Parts of it are good - her writing style is gorgeous in places, tedious in others - and frankly, I just had a hard time keeping up with what the hell was going on.
You gotta have a long attention span for this one and a good eye for detail, both of which I can have when I'm suitably interested, but this one just didn't do it for me.
Just sayin'. View all 6 comments. Helen Dunmore was a British writer who produced an impressive amount of work over the past thirty years with dozens of novels, children's books, short stories and poetry collections. She's someone I always meant to read but never got around to. Sadly she died in , but the following year her final poetry collection posthumously won the Costa Book Awards Book of the Year.
The story is told from the point of view of Catherine who grows up in a country estate with her brother Rob and their grandfather. Their father is housed in an asylum and their mother is a figure of local scandal who lives in France. The children are never told exactly what caused their family to splinter apart so they grow to rely solely on each other in this circumscribed world.
But as they enter adulthood the close bond they share must be left behind though Catherine ardently wants things to remain the same.
There are some very surprising twists in this novel and I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it. This haunting and evocative novel was the first Orange Prize Winner and set a high standard for future hopefuls. Helen Dunmore creates a world which is at once understandable and yet totally different. Rob and Catherine live in virtual isolation in the crumbling old house belonging to their grandfather. It is gradually revealed to us that their mother has left and is living abroad, while their father, unable to cope without her, has been admitted to a sanitorium.
We see events through the eyes o This haunting and evocative novel was the first Orange Prize Winner and set a high standard for future hopefuls. We see events through the eyes of Cathy - a young girl who so resembles her mother that her grandfather can hardly bear to look at her, while their governess, the boy hating Miss Gallagher, harbours an obsessive and unhealthy love for her. Only Kate, the no nonsense Irish servant, brings some kind of stability to the children.
As Cathy and Rob grow older, the outside world intrudes. Cathy has a suitor, in the form of a rich neighbour; while Rob has the beautiful Livvy - as light as Cathy is dark. Yet, Rob and Cathy are thrown together too much, with too many secrets to bind them together. This is a novel of forbidden love, family secrets and how Cathy gradually becomes a woman and learns to understand what drove her mother away.
This is a quiet and thought provoking read, which really packs a punch. Helen Dunmore has long been one of my favourite authors and I enjoyed revisiting this early novel. View 1 comment. Sep 27, Toocutedobs rated it did not like it. This book is a depressing text of the multi-generational misery of one family. I finished the book in hopes of discovery the answer to the family secrets but found no satisfaction there or anywhere else in this book.
But somebody liked this book since it is a "Orange Winner" a prestigious award from England. Jan 30, Barbara rated it it was amazing Shelves: reads , england , women-s-prize-for-fiction. This novel was the first winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in I bought it after the book blogger Simon Savidge and his wonderful mother, Louise Savidge, started reading past winners of the Women's Prize for Fiction.
For the past two years, I have read a number of the longlisted titles, and look forward to the nominations and awards. This novel is set in England in the era of World War I.
T This novel was the first winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in The war starts later in the novel, which was the first clue to the time in which the story is set.
Cathy and her brother Rob live on a rural estate with their grandfather. Their mother abandoned her family and left for warmer parts of Europe. Their father's health declined after this and he was eventually committed to a sanatorium where he died.
The siblings are left to their own devices with only an unlikeable governess, and a single servant to see to their needs. I read this book knowing little of the the plot, and I encourage others to avoid summaries of the novel that reveal far too much. It is a story that is at times enchanting, and at others, frightening. It is a sad tale, that is beautifully written. This is the second Dunmore I've tried.
I don't think she is one for me unfortunately. View 2 comments. I wanted to read this novel as it was the first recipient of the Women's Prize then called the Orange Prize in Catherine, the protagonist, grows up a closely matched pair with her brother, Rob, all the more so as their mother has left, their father is institutionalized, and their grandfather is remote.
It's the Edwardian era, and their manor house is bordered by woodland and something of a sense of menace and encroachment. Helen Dunmore's writing is incredibly atmospheric. She excel 3. She excels at wonderful descriptions of the landscape, from brambly, choking hedges with a sense of decay and branchy woodlands, to fresh soil being ploughed. I was especially taken with the last third or so of the book, as we move towards and into the First World War, and Catherine must decide her future in a very different present.
There were parts earlier in the book when I felt that it was really too long, and the view spoiler [ incest and abortion in the middle was squicky, and also quite an odd reading experience given that I'd inadvertently bagged two reads in a month featuring sibling incest - what?!
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