The Winter People: A Novel Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00HNYAQDC | Format: EPUB
The Winter People: A Novel Description
The New York Times best-selling author of Promise Not to Tell returns with a simmering literary thriller about ghostly secrets, dark choices, and the unbreakable bond between mothers and daughters...sometimes too unbreakable.
West Hall, Vermont, has always been a town of strange disappearances and old legends. The most mysterious is that of Sara Harrison Shea, who, in 1908, was found dead in the field behind her house just months after the tragic death of her daughter, Gertie. Now, in present day, 19-year-old Ruthie lives in Sara's farmhouse with her mother, Alice, and her younger sister, Fawn. Alice has always insisted that they live off the grid, a decision that suddenly proves perilous when Ruthie wakes up one morning to find that Alice has vanished without a trace. Searching for clues, she is startled to find a copy of Sara Harrison Shea's diary hidden beneath the floorboards of her mother's bedroom. As Ruthie gets sucked deeper into the mystery of Sara's fate, she discovers that she's not the only person who's desperately looking for someone that they've lost. But she may be the only one who can stop history from repeating itself.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 10 hours and 46 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Random House Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: February 11, 2014
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00HNYAQDC
This admonition repeats throughout Jennifer McMahon's novel, "The Winter People". A thriller/mystery that incorporates supernatural elements, this book is the best type of dark story - the events are improbable, but still the reader wonders if they just might be possible. The longing to "speak with the dead", to see an individual one last time, and to conquer death provide the impetus for the characters' actions. The overwhelming, obsessive love of a mother for a long-desired child also provides a motive for events. Further, McMahon incorporates the reader's childhood and adult fears - abandonment by parents; the death of a beloved child or spouse; and unexplained nighttime shadows and noises - to produce this gripping story.
Spanning a period between 1908 and the present, the narrative of the "The Winter People" is primarily presented in the third person. Only the secret diary of one individual - Sara Harrison Shea - is written in the first person. That diary provides the cohesive element that ties the different eras and characters together. It also personalizes the story and gives it more a authentic tone. Throughout "The Winter People" and as more information from this diary is revealed, the mystery deepens until the unexpected ending that shocks the reader and evokes sympathy for characters psychologically caught in the grip of the "sleepers" or charged with protecting others from a more horrific fate.
When reading "The Winter People", individuals should be patient. The events and action in this novel are not the type that hit the reader immediately. Rather, Jennifer McMahon builds the tension slowly as the characters continue to discover more of the pages of Sara Harrison Shea's diary.
The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon is set in a Vermont town of "strange disappearances and old legends." Key to the plot is a mysterious structure known as the Devil's Hand. ("The Devil's Hand, people called it, the ledge of rock that stuck up out of the ground like a giant hand, fingers rising from the earth. Haunted land, people said. A place where monsters dwelled." p. 21)
I wanted to like this book more than I did. It is very readable, but I was put off by some plot points meant to confuse the issue that were never explained to my satisfaction. The text is nicely atmospheric and the mystery imaginative. There are some nice character touches; I particularly liked Katherine and her dioramas.
The book contains chapters from a secret diary written in 1908 by Sara (as edited by the author's niece years later and which is known to be missing key pages), chapters narrated in the third person with Sara's husband as the central figure, and chapters narrated by their small daughter Gertie. The 1908 sections alternate with sections set in the present day that are told in the third person about Ruthie, a teenager who lives on the same property as the family from 1908, and Katherine, a recent widow who discovers her husband was killed in a car crash after visiting that property. There are also chapters narrated by Sara in the first person and a letter written in 1886. All of the point of view changing was a little off putting. I wouldn't have minded so much if the diary sections were the only ones told in first person, or even if all of Sara's sections were the only ones told in first person. Also, the framework of an editor of a secret diary didn't really work for me, since the whole book was not told in diary format.
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