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The Gospel Of Winter (2014)

by Brendan Kiely(Favorite Author)

3.78 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1442484896 (ISBN13: 9781442484894)

languge

English

genre

Young Adult Fiction

publisher

Margaret K. McElderry Books

review 1: Well, this is one of the toughest books I've read since my term finished on Amelia Bloomer Project. That reading exposed me to so many powerful stories of women and girls overcoming horrible abuse to find the empowerment of their voices-- and this book deserves equal attention. The Catholic priest sex scandal was/is gut wrenching in it's long-spread, long-term effects, and the author here very bravely puts out a story filled with tough images, tough characters, and thankfully enough resolution in the very last pages to keep the reader from feeling *completely* despondent. As with other stories like this, we just hope it gets into the right hands at the right time. We should spread the word so caring adults know this title exists.
review 2: Oh, how I wanted ... moreto adore The Gospel of Winter: its complex main character, its setting among the very rich in Connecticut, its flawed parents, its eloquent prose. I began reading with such high expectations, and for at least three quarters of the novel, I was “buying it,” despite seeing the book’s flaws. But that last quarter, when I wanted the story to propel to the end, I got bogged down in the author’s verbosity. Lovely verbosity, but verbosity nevertheless. The protagonist, prep school Sophomore Aidan, is intelligent and tortured. He tells the story, and that’s where I was stymied. His vocabulary and syntax are so far above what I, in my thirty year teaching career, encountered in even the most intelligent teens that I just didn’t buy it. For example, in a fantasy about his girlfriend, he says, “I wanted to cinch up the knot in my tie, kiss her on the brow, and tell her to enjoy her day.” What teen would even think of that, albeit a fantasy? Of a snowfall, he waxes, “Beyond the trees, nothing broke through the deadening, washed-out expanse above.” To describe a dog: “A dog with a slow baritone barked.” This is a young man with the vocabulary and skill of a fine writer. The author Brendan Kiely is just that in his word combinations, but his characterization, to me, is way off. I simply can’t picture any of the thousands of teens I’ve known who would speak this way. And I can only picture a handful of those teens sophisticated and knowledgeable in literary fiction to enjoy this novel. It is supposed to be a young adult novel, but it strives to be Fitzgerald or Hemingway. I can only hope that its author moves on to adult fiction and finds his niche in that genre. A side note: although I fully understood the teen characters smoking, pot use, prescription drug abuse and liquoring up as character development tools, I got weary of it. Yes, they are upper class, wealthy kids from a prep school, but are we to believe that all kids of this ilk are drug and alcohol addled, that the only tools to fight their angst are illegal substances? As a YA writer myself, I’m not above using these tools, but they were so pervasive in this tale, that it really bothered me. less

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