This book has a lot of potential. It filled my mind with questions, and urged me to read on. However, those answers finally came, they seemed ill-thought out and rushed. It was as though the authors of House has chosen the first clichéd ending that came to mind and rolled with it.

The book centers on the story of a married couple who are facing issues in their marriage, as well as their own personal demons. They become stranded and venture to a nearby house to use a phone. There the meet another couple in the same situation. Their brief attempts to find rescue go nowhere, and soon they find themselves in a confusing world with a man intent on killing them stalking them through the house.

Needless to say, this is no ordinary house. If it were the book would probably have gotten a different title. The house becomes an entity in and of itself, changing to represent each person’s individual nightmares. This is intriguing. You think you’ll find out more of their character by what they see, you’ll get more back story, more depth. Sadly, I never really felt that I did. Again, facts are thrown out but they never truly seem to explain the characters’ motivation or history.

I was strangely hopeful that this book would continue to be as compelling as it started out to be, but I was disappointed in the final forty pages. This would make for a good plane read if you like the supernatural.

Rent House at Bookswim

- Kristin
Diverxtrme

I have read several Patricia McKillip books and really enjoy the imagery and poetry of her books. The prequel to Solstice Wood, Winter Rose, is one of my favorite books by Patricia McKillip. Unfortunately, Solstice Wood did not meet my expectations.

The story takes place in a modern setting instead of a far off place and time. Sylvia is the distant descendant of Rois Melior from Winter Rose. Solstice Wood in turn is a distant descendant of Winter Rose. Instead of drawing me in, the story felt disconnected and remote. I couldn’t relate to the characters or feel their emotions in the way I have come to expect in Patricia Mckillip’s books.

The story is told from the viewpoint of several different characters adding to the disconnected feeling. Just when you start to get used to a character and the way the think and feel, the story switches gears and you have to start seeing things from the view of a different character. Because of this, you never really get attached to any one of the characters.

Solstice Wood was a disappointment when I was hoping for a story that would pull me in and make me feel the characters longing and hunger and anger and love. Try instead some of Patricia McKillip’s other books such as The Forgotten Beasts of Eld and Winter Rose.

Rent Solstice Wood at BookSwim.

Some novelists darken with age, expressing ever deepening gloom about the human condition as they glimpse the bigger picture. (Exhibit A: Philip Roth.) Others, unaccountably, soften. In the latter category is Ian McEwan, the British writer who began his career in the 1970s and ’80s with a string of macabre books about incest, depravity, and murder, but whose more recent work glows with a sweetly romantic faith in the human potential for happiness. In particular, domestic happiness. It is not easily attained, however, this happiness of McEwan’s. And it is almost always under assault — by the demented stalker of Enduring Love, by Saturday’s disenfranchised intruder. In his latest novel, the exquisite On Chesil Beach, the threats to the good life are more prosaic but no less deadly: immaturity, impatience, the impulsive wrong decision.
”They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible,” begins this compressed, crisp, but warmly specific fable. The year is 1962, and Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting are dining in their hotel suite on England’s Chesil Beach. They are deeply in love, a state that McEwan treats tenderly and with utmost respect: ”They had so many plans, giddy plans, heaped up before them in the misty future, as richly tangled as the summer flora of the Dorset coast, and as beautiful.”
Moving gracefully between the two, McEwan captures both their shared joy and their terrible private worries, almost exclusively about what will transpire when they approach the ”four poster bed, rather narrow, whose bedcover was pure white and stretched startlingly smooth, as though by no human hand.” Edward — eager, ordinary — fears ”arriving too soon.” Florence agonizes not about arrival, but the journey itself. Sexual squeamishness has never been written about more adroitly or sympathetically. In a wedding handbook Florence finds ”certain phrases that almost make her gag: mucous membrane, and the sinister and glistening glans. Other phrases offended her intelligence, particularly those concerning entrances: Not long before he enters her…”
Put like this, you can hardly blame her. But toward that portentous bed and their future they proceed, Edward and Florence, with their anxieties as well as their ardent, fragile love. To reveal what lies in store would lessen the pleasure of reading this small masterpiece, though it’s hard to imagine that anything could spoil it. “A”