Review: Snow Soldiers
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 01 8, 2013
****Spoilers Included****To begin, the title, Snow Soldiers, has little to do with the book. Kate and her friend Viv mention this several times, but the meaning isn't clear. Is it a reference to a shared experience from their college days? Is it a metaphor for finding one's inner strength? Is it, as alluded to once, a metaphor for developing armor to protect oneself from the harsh realities of the world? Take your pick.Ironically, while she's spending time away from her husband and sons (who live in Ireland) at her American family's summer beach house in Michgan, she's snowed in one day. The power goes out, the phone line is down. It's not suburbia but it's not terribly isolated. Nevertheless, Kate panics. Although Kate grew up in Michigan, she reacts as if she's never experienced a snowstorm. Her experience of surviving this storm (which only lasts for a day) becomes the big story of her sabbatical.The whole book is anticlimactic. Kate starts to research her deceased maternal grandmother, who is constantly referred to as the bitch because she was cold and critical. One would think that Kate will discover the secret or meaning of her grandmother's personality, but that story line just ends with a 'we'll never really know.' Then it seems like the book may really be about the relationships of women: grandmothers,mothers, daughters, aunts, cousins, best friends. Kate spends a lot of time thinking about and talking to the various women in her life, but her own mother is nearly absent from Kate's story. We learn very little about Kate's relationship with her mother, whether it is good or bad or how it has affected Kate.The book dragged. It was redundant, wordy exposition. In addition to the lack of real content, the mechanical problems were too numerous to overlook, with run-on sentences, comma splices, and misused apostrophes on nearly every page. Worse, there were many sentences in which a comma was omitted that caused unclear meaning. There were too many 'your' and 'you're' type errors.This book needs a lot of tightening. Take out all the wordiness and repetition and exposition and have the characters DO more. Show instead of tell, but show with meaningful details, not irrelevant filler. Then have a good proofreader correct the grammatical and usage errors. The last page or so seems to finally say what the point of the book was, but by the end, I really didn't care any more.