REVIEW: Snow-Kissed by Laura Florand
Dear Ms. Florand:
When you offered me this book for review, you warned me that it might be a bit too angsty for me, given my preferences. And Snow-Kissed was definitely an angsty read. But despite that, I found myself engaged by the characters and the story, and I read the novella in one sitting. I can’t say the book worked for me on an emotional level (with one exception), but I thought it was well executed and largely succeeded at what it was trying to do. I liked it enough to recommend it to DA’s readers, but I worried about being able to do it justice in a review given my somewhat cerebral reaction. Luckily, Willaful found that she connected with its emotions, and she suggested we do a joint review with a twist: Introducing our Head/Heart review of Snow-Kissed!
Willaful
Warning: I’m going to take base advantage of writing the “heart” review and let myself get as self-indulgent as I wanna be, starting with my soundtrack for the book. Although it’s set during Christmas, I could not stop thinking of Dar Williams’ “February”:
And February was so long that it lasted into March
And found us walking a path alone together.
You stopped and pointed and you said, “That’s a crocus,”
And I said, “What’s a crocus?” and you said, “It’s a flower,”
I tried to remember, but I said, “What’s a flower?”
You said, “I still love you.”
(A digression: my interpretation of this song was always that the relationship ended, but a youtube comment suggests that it was reborn instead. It turns out that’s the way my husband, the eternal optimist, has always interpreted it. Anyway, that makes it fit the story even better. )
A man paints powdered sugar snow on a woman’s body and licks it off… it sounds like a classic sexy scene from one of the charming “Amour et Chocolat” books. Except this man is in deadly earnest as he melts sugar and tries to melt the ice around his wife’s heart. Kurt and Kai have been separated for over a year, after Kai’s third miscarriage drove her into a grief too intense to be shared, and she left him. Now she’s holed up in a cabin, trying to lose herself in her work as a food stylist, only to find herself snowed in with the one person she can’t bear to be with:
She had so hoped that she had reach a point where she could — see him. Where all that long process of coming to peace with herself and her losses would be strong enough to withstand a glimpse of him. But all of her, every iota of strength and peace, had dissolved into pain and longing the instant she saw him step out of his car, a flake of snow catching on his hair.
Kai has worked hard to turn her overpowering feelings into something calm, “a slushy of grief that lay cold in her middle but no longer spilled out at every wrong movement, every careless glimpse of happy couples of children laughing in a park.” Being frozen hurts less than feeling. But it’s impossible to stay frozen around someone who whose love can cut her so deeply.
Her stomach tightened as if he had just pierced it with some long, strange, beautiful shard of ice. Kurt. Don’t take care of me. You always did that so, so — the ice shard slid slowly through her inner organs, slicing, hurting — well.
Cutting ice, a frozen heart… all clues to the inspiration for this story. The parallels are fairly subtle though (unlike Florand’s The Chocolate Rose, which I thought suffered from sticking too closely to its source.) I wasn’t even sure it was deliberate until I happened to think about Florand’s use of names in previous books — Jolie for the “Beauty” in The Chocolate Rose, Magalie, the heavily guarded Pearl of The Chocolate Kiss, and then it hit me — of course, her name is Kai. Kai, the boy with evil glass in his eye and his heart… no longer able to see what is true and beautiful… saved by the tears of the girl who loved him.
My mom telling me that story is one of my earliest memories, and I’ve always been drawn to adaptations of it (The Snow Queen by Joan Vinge is wonderful) so that might be one of the reasons I fell so hard for this. I’m also pretty much the perfect audience for it: not only do I live for emotional reads, but I’ve shared many experiences with Kai (but have some distance and closure so it’s not too raw) and know how exactly right Florand gets everything. What it’s like to not be able to have the one thing you want more than anything, what it’s like to have your body fail at its most basic task, with reminders of that failure everywhere, what it’s like to have a grief you can’t share with the person whom you love the most. I remember browsing through a book and coming across the phrase, “a miscarriage is the loneliest grief in the world,” and bursting into tears right there in the library stacks.
So I couldn’t help but love this for expressing those emotions so truly and beautifully. (I don’t have quite the same personal connection to Kurt’s point of view, but I felt it was equally honest and moving.) And it caught me in other ways as well. With the stakes so high, the sex scenes have a thrilling intensity:
Her own body didn’t know which would win, his tension or his gentleness. Such a tantalizing knife’s edge. She wanted to fall on both sides.
Oh, but that would cut her right in two. She would never get the pieces of herself back again.
And even amidst the angst there are playful and funny moments and tender sharing and — after all miss, this is Florand — wonderful food.
And most of all, there’s romance at its strongest and most powerful, as Kai discovers how intensely Kurt loves her and how real that love is. Snow-Kissed is obviously about grief and loss and their effects on the spirit, and it’s a beautifully done, insightful portrayal. But at its deepest heart it’s about love, the true, devoted, thick and thin kind of love — not uncritical, slavish adoration, which passes for it in a lot of romance, but love that is honest and clear-sighted, sometimes angry, yet unconditional.
Here’s what my head says about the book: the writing is perhaps overly lush in the first chapter or so — it loosens up as the story arc does — and gets repetitious in the middle section. I was leaning towards a lesser grade because of those issues. And then I got to the ending, the absolutely-perfect-exactly-what-I-needed-ending, and I knew this could only be an A.
Sunita
The first couple of pages, with their lush, expressive prose, told me I was in for an emotional ride, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t the right reader/reviewer. But despite my instinctive withdrawal from the intense emotional atmosphere, I kept reading, because even though I felt outside the target audience, the book was drawing me in. Kai’s voice was compelling, and when Kurt showed up, I had to read on. It’s an odd sensation to read a romance book from the outside, so to speak, because of all the genres, romance is the one where emotional engagement seems the most important. But I didn’t want to DNF the book, even though I wasn’t entirely sure why.
The food-related scenes and metaphors that set the stage were a little too plentiful for me, but I think that readers who enjoy impassioned atmosphere will find them compelling. Once Kai and Kurt started interacting, I settled into a reading groove. Kurt is very much in the style of Florand’s other heroes, not a copycat of any of his predecessors, but clearly related. The way he controlled and restrained his unhappiness made a great foil for Kai and helped provide balance for me as I read.
And the sex scenes? Oh, they are something. They were uncomfortable to read at times, because you know these two have a long, hard road to even an HFN, and sex between people who love each other but aren’t sure they can be together is so wrenching and bittersweet. I blogged a little while ago about closed-door romances and how I hope they aren’t going away, but this story is Exhibit A for what we missed when those were the norm. I’m not sure that what is communicated in these scenes, and the way the plot and relationship develop, could have been conveyed without them.
The novella is intensely focused on Kai and Kurt, which works well both in terms of the story development and the word count constraints. Kurt’s mother Anne, plays an important off-page role, and I really liked the way Florand integrated her role as mother and mother-in-law. She starts out sounding like Martha Stewart but the context in which her actions take place add an unexpectedly rich dimension to the story and remind us how often intimate tragedies extend beyond the immediate people who go through them.
I said that this was mostly a head-focused reading experience for me, but I also mentioned there was an exception, so here’s the heart part of my review: I haven’t been in either Kai or Kurt’s position, but I know what it’s like to be a couple’s only child by default and bad fortune rather than by choice. Coming at it from that history and experience, many years later, this book really rang true for me. Grade: B+
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I had the opposite reaction. To me, the book felt artificial. It made me cry, but when I finished it, I felt emotionally manipulated. The over-the-top angst and emotion are contagious, so I did have a basic response to it. After all, it’s hard not to feel bad when the characters keep crying and saying how miserable they are, but ultimately they failed to make me care about them because I couldn’t see the real people under all the crying and suffering.
It pains me because I love “marriage in trouble” and “second chance at love” stories, but I just couldn’t connect with the characters.
@Brie: Oh, that’s interesting, and thanks for commenting! I recoiled a bit from the angst because I have a visceral reaction to that level of expressed emotion, but I did find them believable. So I guess I was the opposite?
I know that other Florand books haven’t worked for you, and I wonder if there’s something in the writing style, or in the way the characters are presented, that creates that disconnect? Because I know you and I frequently have the same response to books, so our divergence here makes me want to understand both my reaction and yours better.
i enjoyed florand’s chocolate books, but thought i’d skip this because i heard it was angsty and (sue me) i tend not to be interested in romances about marriage. (i do devour literary fiction about marriage, because i look for utter escapism in romance and…well, you know what, this is not relevant so i will SHUT UP and say): OH I DID NOT KNOW THIS WAS ABOUT GRIEF AFTER MISCARRIAGE AND THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING. i just bought it. because i have never been so crazy and depressed and confused and unentitled to my own feelings and on another planet from my husband as when i was coping with this loss. and this kind of mad grief is so rarely dealt with enough in books of any kind; loss of a child, yes, but not loss of a fetus…and part of why i was so at sea was because i felt isolated and angry at myself for being such a freaking mess. i mean, OTHER people had lost ACTUAL ON-THIS-EARTH HUMAN BEINGS they’d come to know and love, and THEY get to grieve; why couldn’t i snap out of it? anyway: i’m looking forward to reading this. (well, not looking forward to revisiting the saddest time of my life, but looking forward to reading a story about someone who heals.) (and today i’m fine too. incidentally!)
I had an interesting reaction to this one as well. I love Laura Florand’s work and her voice generally. I also love her other shorter piece regarding a marriage in trouble (Turn Up the Heat? not sure I’m remembering the title correctly). And on top of all that, I can relate to the grief associated with a miscarriage, though I was fortunate enough to go on to have two children after mine. And yet, even though I liked this book, there was something distancing about it for me as well. I somehow couldn’t quite connect with the characters. I kept thinking “This is really nicely written and seems very authentic. So why am I not connecting with these characters?”. I finished it and intellectually thought it was well done, but didn’t have the expected emotional reaction. It goes to show, I guess, that these reactions are very personal and perhaps sometimes inexplicable.
@marjorie: That was a fabulous summary, especially considering you haven’t read the book yet. ;-) I think it really did capture those feelings. I hope it’ll be a good read for you like it was for me.
@Brie: I always think feeling manipulated is an interesting response, because in a sense, all fiction writing is a form of manipulating the reader. And yet sometimes it works seamlessly and then other times we see the inner workings too much. I’m not sure if this is a case where the “reader consent” concept works, but I don’t have a better explanation.
thank you, willaful! i’ll be interested in my reaction to it — even if i have issues with it as a book, i expect i’ll be grateful that someone tackled the subject.
and thinking aloud: i didn’t really connect with annie lamott’s traveling mercies, because it is a book about faith, and how can you explain faith? i respected the book, but i did not viscerally respond to it. i wonder if there are similar challenges in explaining grief.
In a recent post on her blog, Ilona Andrews talks about the creative interaction that occurs between the story and the reader. She wrote:
That might account for the heart/head differences encountered by Willaful and Sunita. They bring different palettes to bear on the unfolding story.
I think that’s particularly apt with a work like Snow-Kissed, which deals with such intense subjects. When the story opens, Kai, the heroine, has lost more than three pregnancies. Also gone are her sense of self, her belief in the survivability of the future, her competence and any feeling or worth or desirability as a mate. What’s left is guilt for being unable to sustain the pregnancies, for daring to try repeatedly, and for the pain she knows she caused her husband. It’s inconceivable to her that her husband, Kurt, would ever want her back.
At first glance, this would probably be too much to take. The characters seem irretrievably painted into the corner of despair. What sets the story apart is that sex and intimacy are the means by which Kurt reaches for Kai through the miasma. I don’t think that there are a lot of writers working today who could pull something like this off. But as Ilona Andrews described, Ms. Florand gives readers the blueprint. She conjures up such provocative intimacy between Kai and Kurt, that readers’ hearts melt right along with the characters. I found it to be a cathartic experience because the story conjures forgiveness in the face of so much sadness and disappointment.
I hope that readers will dare to take the journey into the challenging subject matter because the resolution is so satisfying that it makes it a very rewarding trip.
@marjorie: That’s a really interesting comment about Anne Lamott. I had a different reaction – I connected viscerally to Traveling Mercies – and I’m not sure I know why exactly. But reading that and Plan B affected me emotionally, in a way that her more recent work like Grace Eventually and the one about her grandson’s first year, did not. I think it’s possible to describe an experience with something intangible like faith or grief in a way that resonates with some readers – I know I’ve read things that have resonated – but I think it must be hard to do.
I think you all are really on to something in terms of the individuality of each reader’s response to a deeply emotional event/circumstance. I think one of the reasons I kept reading even when this was out of my emotional comfort zone was that it was recognizably a story that warranted being told in an emotionally all-out way. And so often this particular sorrow is underplayed or dialed down, even in fiction written about women and by women, so not holding back felt a little like righting the balance, if that makes sense. By the time I finished writing my part of the review, I realized the novella had gotten to me more than I had at first acknowledged. I can understand feeling manipulated, as Brie did, because I’ve had that experience with other books, ones other readers intensely connected with. I think that’s the hazard of writing something at this emotional pitch.
Ack! I accidentally deleted a looong comment. Here’s the short version: @Willaful: romance is (mostly) an emotionally-charged genre, and so the manipulation is even more common or easy to see, but most of the time is either more subtle* or we’re so immersed in the story that we don’t see or care about it. I have enjoyed many OTT angsty novels that were clearly designed to make the reader feel all the feelings, but in this one I kept seeing the manipulation at work and it was distracting because I wasn’t invested or interested enough. So yes, maybe it is about reader consent or even the id vortex (although this clearly wasn’t an id-vortex story to Sunita and still worked for her).
@Sunita: I don’t need to like or relate to the characters in order to enjoy a book, but in Florand’s case, my inability to relate and like her characters gets in the way of my enjoyment. I also think her full-length books have pacing issues, which doesn’t help. Other than that, I can’t pinpoint or articulate more reasons why her books don’t work for me (and I’ve spent time thinking about it). They just don’t.
*Obviously the subtlety is relative and subjective.
A heads-up — the author posted that the $.99 intro price ends today.
@Sunita:
I downloaded a sample of this novella and I find I feel the same way. I think of myself as someone who likes emotional books more than you do, but this novella deposits the reader square in the center of the heroine’s angst, and it’s hard for me to connect with that much emotion (esp. couched in the snow and sugar metaphors) without knowing through the character what the reason for all this emotion is. I’m not sure I can stick with it.
@Janine: I can see that. You do find out relatively quickly what the cause of the emotion is, although I’m not sure it happens within the sample. But it makes sense, and while I was tapping my foot to get to the Big Issue, it showed up in time for me to keep going.
Just reading the review was almost too much for me. Unlike Willaful, it hasn’t nearly been long enough for me to have sufficient distance from the subject matter. I’m (still) at the place where I don’t think that will ever happen.
But, I’m kind of glad it’s out there, because from what I’ve read in the review and in the comments, it sounds like Florand gets it right.
I’ve just finished this book. I connected with it emotionally. Even when I knew I was being manipulated by the author, I couldn’t help it – I was very moved by the story.
This is one of those stories about emotions and feelings that we women enjoy and men hardly do. I was trying to explain it to my significant other, but it wasn’t until I read this review and I told him about Dar William’s song -that he understood me.
Another thing that I found fascinating is that this is a book about two people, nobody else is fisically there BUT there’s a real third character: Kurt’s mother. It’s incredible how you can imagine her without seeing her in the actual story. But I have to recognize that I’d preferred a less obvious name for her than Anne Winters.
@Bona: Such characters can be so interesting… there’s another fascinating one in The Last Honest Cowboy by Kathleen Eagle, though disappointingly, when I got to his book I DNF’d it. Florand is actually writing a story for Anne — she posted some bits during DABWAHA — which I hope won’t elicit the same response. ;-)