Customer Reviews

Midwinter

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was attracted to Midwinter because of the beautiful cover art (by Chris McGrath) and the publisher's blurb. This sounds like my kind of story. Unfortunately, this novel didn't deliver what I was looking for, but it had so much potential that I hold out hope for future efforts from Matthew Sturges.

Midwinter starts out well. The prose is pleasant -- perfectly readable and without any pretensions. Usually this is the first place an author will lose me, but Mr Sturges didn't.

The main characters, especially Mauritane, Silverdun, Satterly, and Raieve, are intriguing and I was fully expecting to be drawn into their lives. However, I never was. Part of the problem was the third-person point of view that shifted unexpectedly. It never settled down long enough to examine the hearts of the key players. Some of the secondary characters such as Lady Anne, Queen Mab, Hy Pezho, and Purane-Es were given excellent characterization, so I know that Mr Sturges is capable. But, the main characters never opened up for me, so I felt like an outsider during their quest.

I also never quite felt the setting. It's midwinter and our heroes are traveling, eating, sleeping, and fighting outdoors in the snow, but I never felt cold. Most of the characters are fae and we are several times told how different they are from humans, but we are never shown how they are different (except that toward the end of the book we're told that they are drained by cold iron, and they have funny ears).

There are some flashes of imaginative brilliance (I loved the shifting areas in the Contested Lands, and the messages sprites were hilarious), but there are also a lot of elements that just seem weirdly cobbled together (e.g., the philosophy discussions, the humans stuck in faery, the changeling trade, Avalon, Sylvan, the Arcadian religion, the Thule Man, cars and rebar, Mab's flying city, the prophecy). I may be completely wrong about this, but I have noticed in other new novelists a tendency to throw in a bunch of disparate ideas -- as if the author had been collecting these fancies for years and then assembled them all in their first novel. Or, sometimes perhaps they do this because these elements came up during their research and they feel the need to include them. I am not accusing Mr Sturges of either of these motivations, but that's just what it feels like. I found myself often saying "huh? Where did that come from? ... Where's the kitchen sink?" I am certainly not asking for my fantasy to be straight-up medieval-style epic, but this was just confusing.

So, basically it was the lack of characterization of the heroes and the strange hodgepodge that kept me from enjoying Midwinter as much as I thought I would. I do, however, have high hopes for Matthew Sturges and I would not refuse to read a different story in another setting.

In Matthew Sturges's own words, Midwinter is "The Dirty Dozen with elves." While that theme is well used across genres, it's one of my favorites because when it's done right it makes for great story-telling. So, I really expected to like this novel.

Midwinter started out strong. Immediately following the prolog, there's an awesome prison fight. But from that point on, the rest of the story was like being in a thick fog. Details are vague. There's nothing that seems particularly elfish about the elves. Winter is supposed to play such a big part, but I kept forgetting it was even cold. The pace alternates between moving too fast and getting side-tracked down boring and ill-fitting tangents.

Magic is so infused into this world that it warps natural order and has become part of almost all of the denizens. It's there when you need a light, when you want to give your horse the ability to talk, or when ya just want to make yourself look more fashionable, but for reasons never really explained, it may or may not be usable in a tight spot.

One of the important elements of Midwinter is a relationship between our real world and this land of the Fae. I tend to like having a link to our Earth in a fantasy story, but I found the introduction of our modern technology into this setting to be jarring -- almost laughable. Hey, I think a `71 Pontiac Lemans is one of the coolest cars of all time too, but that doesn't mean I want to find one in this sort of fantasy novel.

I'll readily admit that maybe I just didn't "get-it." If that's the case, it's because by the time I got to the last third of the book, I was too bored to even care anymore. For the Dirty Dozen theme to work, you have to make the reader care about the characters. There are some truly interesting characters in Midwinter, they just needed more development. Mr. Sturges is a talented author and has a successful career writing comics. But Midwinter needed to be fleshed out more in order to compensate for not having any illustrations.

This book left me really conflicted. I wanted to like it. Really. The plot seemed promising, the world interesting, the take on faerie refreshing, and the author hails from my favorite town, Austin, TX. At its core, Midwinter is a variant of the standard fantasy quest: our hero, a man of basic decency and moral character, is plucked from obscurity, entrusted with a suicidal task against enemies unknown, and accompanied by a cast of misfits, malcontents, and unreliables. Sturges embellishes the plot with some courtly intrigue (which never gets explained very well), parallel worlds (great idea, but again left somewhat undeveloped), and religious strife.

Despite my enthusiasm, the book never really delivered on its earlier promise. Just as I suspended my disbelief and became engrossed in the action, I would chance upon a scene or description that would gently nudge me back into the real world and make me aware that I was reading. Some of it is minor: for example, every character rolls his or her eyes at least once in the book. No matter how grave the scene, how dire the situation, someone finds a way to express their disapproval by rolling their eyes. Not only is it not believable in places, but because Sturges uses this turn of phrase so often, it feels contrived even when a good old fashioned eye roll seems quite appropriate. Then there are issues with presentation. The book is divided into chapters but could have used further subdivisions into sections. Think I am quibbling here? Just wait until you are merrily reading along and seemingly in the middle of a scene, with no typographical and spacing clues that the action is about to shift in both time and space, you are reading about the thoughts and doings of characters far removed from the preceding sentence in the same paragraph. Regrettable to say the least. I could go on for a while: some characters are woefully under-developed (the hero's love/lust interest comes to mind here), the court plot arcane and poorly explained, etc. but there is no sense in piling on the criticism.

In short, Midwinter is just bad enough to be bad. With even a few minor tweaks and a strong editor, this could have been a contender for your valuable reading time and dollars. Alas, the novel is stuck in a metaphorical winter all of its own making with no prospect of a spring thaw. Skip this one and try something else.

In its early pages _Midwinter_ showed a lot of promise. The story opens in a distant, isolated castle-turned-prison, cold and bitter with winter. Its towers are spellturned--a term not explained--and it holds some very unlikely criminals within.

We meet the hero and his main antagonist; we see his interactions with the strange crew he has to take along on an even stranger mission, and before they've even left the prison our protagonist, Mauritane, has done things to make the reader perhaps wonder--just how heroic is he? He's definitely not wearing a pure white hat. One can see a fascinating adventure building....

So why three stars?

Another reviewer mentioned that _Midwinter_ suffers from an overload of Neat Ideas. Boy, does it ever, and that comment made me realize what was increasingly bothering me about the book as I read it, that I hadn't been able to put a finger on myself. Spellturning. Spellwire. Flying cities, elves in Pontiacs, changelings. Holes into Faerie, a town covered year-round by mist, religious rebellion, mestines, and that's just the start of it; the book picks up and puts down many toys, but few of them are actually developed. Or, in the case of Fae magic and Gifts, explained at all. With fewer ideas there might've been more room for convincing setting and characterization.

The book has show-vs.-tell issues when it comes to the characters, but not in the sense that Sturges only tells and never shows. It's more like what he shows contradicts what he tells, with characters falling all over themselves to let us know how honorable Mauritane is (including Mauritane himself) but his behavior not living up to the standard. The story wants us to think Silverdun was an ugly man inside who has been changed by his journey. I didn't see the ugliness *or* the change. The villain apparently has MPD, since he wants nothing more than to be a poet... no, he's strongly against the Arcadians and devoted to wiping them out... no, he wants to be Captain of the Guard someday....

I don't know. Maybe the heroes are meant to be unreliable narrators and antiheroes, but they're played so straight, I found most of them harder and harder to care for as the book went on. The promise of the beginning mostly gave way and the story ultimately collapsed under the weight of undeveloped ideas for me. I started out intrigued and entertained; I ended up just glad it was over, and so three stars are the most I can give.

Matthew Sturges does write very readable prose, and I wouldn't be that surprised if he ends up being a successful, entertaining name in the fantasy field--assuming his later works fulfill their potential better than did _Midwinter_.

I've started this book twice, that's how much I wanted to like it, but sadly I do not. Chris McGrath's haunting cover did more to draw me into the story then most of what I've actually read. I'm on page 100 this time around and am trying to talk myself into finishing it, that's how bad the writing is. The premise is good. You have a fallen hero sent on what is described as a nearly impossible mission with a motley crew of helpers. It's a classic theme, and has been done very well before, but this author lacks the ability to make you even care. Someone described the writing and characterization as very surface, and that's accurate. You never get any real sense of the depths of these characters and you also don't get, at least in the first 100 pages, any sense of comraderie, and that's a big problem. This is an important element of story-building in a tale of this kind, but here it is almost completely missing and that works against drawing you in and building your interest. Perhaps that gets better the further along you read, I don't know. I'm also disappointed at the author's almost complete inability to set the scene. Others have commented on this too. There is such wasted potential here. The book's title is "Midwinter" for heaven's sake, yet once you move beyond the prison you don't feel the cold or the elements much at all. Then we get to the bit where The Lady Anne is introduced, kind of the final straw for me. She receives an invitation to a party from Purane-Es, but she's drawn as not being able to place the name? Say what? Is she some kind of nitwit? Killing this man's brother got her husband sent to prison. That was a pretty big event in her life, made great changes in her social status etc., yet now, a scant few years later, we are expected to believe that she doesn't recognize the name immediately? It's just not even remotely believable. So, overall, great cover, but not so great inside. Mauritaine is a character, as are Silverdun, Raieve, etc., I would have liked to get to know. I wanted to know them and care about their adventure and their quest, but here I just don't, and that's the author letting his readers down. If you feel you must read this, I suggest you try to get it from your local library, but go in with very low expectations. Maybe then you won't be disappointed too.

In my opinion, Midwinter is an unfinished novel. While it features a capable cast of heroes, cinematic action, and a fast pace, it lacks depth in terms of character and plot. The author, Matthew Sturges, knows only how to describe what is happening. He does not know how to delve into the minds of the characters to provide insight on their agendas beyond the obvious, and he does not know how to enrich his story with theme and substance so it becomes more than an adventure yarn. Even as an adventure, it is unsatisfactory because the hero Mauritaine completes his mission rather effortlessly. As a writer, Sturges has a lot to learn. His transitions are abrupt; more than once, the setting changes from one sentence to the next without warning. He dances around themes of faith and loyalty but does not explore them meaningfully. The villains Mab and Hy Pezho are cartoonish without understandable motives. He attempts to humanize Purane-Es, Mauritaine's primary adversary, with an offbeat romance and then wastes the effort by turning him into a lunatic. He tries to customize magic by way of Gifts, but at the end mages are suddenly doing everything mages do in other fantasies. He rushes through the climactic battle between Seelie and Unseelie and starts and ends Mauritaine's confrontation with Purane-Es in one page. Where is the payoff? He also skips the sex scenes. Like many other hackneyed fantasies, Midwinter is To Be Continued, but my time spent among the Fae is over.

Better known as co-author of the first volumes of the Fables comic series, Matthew Sturges has turned his talents to novel writing.

Like his fellow Clockwork Storybook writer Chris Roberson, Sturges has produced a variation on the "Dirty Dozen" concept--prisoners given a chance at redemption by taking a one-way near-suicidal mission. Roberson set a Dirty Dozen in his "Chinese and Aztec" universe in The Dragon's Nine Sons.

Midwinter, Sturges effort, is similarly located in a place very different than our Earth--in Faerieland.

Midwinter is the story of Mauritaine. War hero, former Captain of the Royal Guard, he is in prison for a crime he didn't commit. He gets the chance at redemption at the low part of a 100 year cycle in the seasons--Midwinter. It seems that this occasion has cause for the Queen of the Seelie, Regina Titania, to offer a secret mission to him, and a few of his fellow prisoners. Survive, and their sentences will be commuted.

Not everyone is happy about this mission of course, especially Queen Titania's rival, Queen Mab of the Unseelie. As well as rivals to Mauritaine within the realm of the Seelie, and possibly within his own party...

The novel is both familiar and new in its treatment of Faerie and its inhabitants. The team has a variety of tropes, including a displaced human whose knowledge of technology and science seems useless in Faerie. At first.

We also have a couple of POVs from outside of the team, in both the Courts of Titania as well as Mab. Some of these POVs and characters are more compelling and well drawn than others.

I enjoyed the inventiveness of the premise (of winter coming to the land every century). I guessed the secret of the mission before it was revealed, but only just. And there are other delights in the world, like the strange Contested Lands, and the floating city that Mab calls her capital.

Overall, while I enjoyed the novel and was entertained, I do not think the novel quite hits on all cylinders. I do want to see how Sturges grows as a writer in subsequent novels. There is clear potential here that I would love to see in full bloom. So, if you can forgive a few faults in the novel, then you, too, just might enjoy Midwinter.

Midwinter was my most anticipated read from Pyr this year and it turns out that it more than lived up to my expectations. This is the world of the Faery, but the way Sturges handles them is a bit more original and realistic in a lot of senses than I have read before. Even though the Fae are long lived and most have some modicum of magical abilities (called Gifts) they are not the powerful beings most would associate them as and theirs is even an almost caste-like culture. That said Titania and Mab are quite powerful and there is something different about the main character Mauritaine. When I first started I thought I was in the same universe that Justina Robson created with her Keeping It Real (Quantum Gravity, Book 1) / Quantum Gravity series, although Sturges truly makes the idea of his own shared dimensions standout.

We join Mauritaine where he has been imprisoned for two years of a life sentence for an offense not revealed until much later on. To the Fae of this world honor and loyalty are most important and to Mauritaine it is nearly everything. Even though sentenced to life in jail he is offered a pardon if he succeeds on a mission for Titania, Queen of the Seelie. He is allowed to bring some of the prisoners with him to aide in the mission. All of the would be rogues in his rag tag band have been imprisoned wrongly or so we are lead to believe. The group consists of a fallen nobleman, a human, a female fae from the dimension of Avalona, and an old comrade of Mauritaine that went down with him. The author sets up the dimensional idea really well, which left me grasping from more detail. The human is supposed to be from a contemporary time as our own, although contact has been mostly cut off from the human world for hundreds of years. There are hints at the reasons Faery has been cut off from the human world, which will hopefully be revealed in future installments.

The group has to head through enemy territory and a disputed zone of the Seelie and Unseelie called The Contested Lands and their shifting places. I loved the idea of the shifting places, where time can be different depending on where you stand in the Contested Lands. So a short journey can be done quickly or slowly but the shirting places can also tear you apart. The floating cities of Mab were a truly inspired touch even though you only get a few glimpses of them. I did feel the ending was a bit rushed as I saw the book only had about 30 pages left and they still hadn't achieved a major objective of their mission. But Sturges managed to pull it off, which is better than feeling like the story is dragging as a few books I've read recently have done. The world building although not as detailed as I would have like, was impressive with its history that leaves the door open for so much more. My biggest gripe is not getting to learn more about these other worlds and their histories, especially Avalona, which we learn almost nothing about in how it differs from Fae.

Midwinter should definitely appeal to readers of Abercrombie and Lynch or anyone looking for an adventurous read à la the dirty dozen with a healthy dose of fantasy mixed in. Pyr and Lou Anders have once proven again that they are the leader in the Fantasy and Sci-Fi. Midwinter is now in the running from one of my top reads of the year. I'll be one of the first to grab a copy of the follow-up of Mauritaine's adventures in The Office of the Shadow, which will hopefully bow early next year. I give Midwinter 9.0 out of 10 hats.

Matthew Sturges has written a lot of comic books over the last few years. Along with Bill Willingham, he's penned the adventures of Jack of Fables, a series steeped in fairy tales and fantasy. Midwinter is his first fantasy novel, and he shows real style and flair for prose.

When the novel starts out, the hero Mauritaine is in prison where he's been kept for a couple years. He's been victimized by a highborn lord and lost all his rights. He hasn't seen his wife in all that time and he knows it's hard on her. Then he gets an offer he can't refuse, a secret, suicidal mission that will return him to the life he once knew. If only he can survive desperate foes and dangerous lands.

Sturges plants his readers deeply into the plot within just a few short pages, then kicks the stakes up to life or death. I enjoyed the whirlwind way he plunges the action along and brings some backstory along the way. However, I also have to confess that I got lost along the way every now and again, and I never quite understood what the "Gifts" were. There are supposed to only be twelve of them, and I still couldn't name them even if I tried because I don't think they were all mentioned in the story. Then, at the end of the book, we find out there's a thirteenth Gift after all.

I think the book could have benefitted from more explanation at times, but it might have interrupted the pacing, which is one of the really good things about the novel. Sturges writes action sequences like an old pro, and his dialogue is good.

I liked the conflict that came up between the characters. Despite bouncing around in the heads of the various members of Mauritaine's party, I couldn't pick the traitor in his midst.

The overall worldbuilding was pretty good. I got the two factions of the elves fighting each other for control, but I didn't see how the Real World fit into the story. Sturges dips into the Real World a few times, bringing Mauritaine into conflict with human as well as bringing artifacts to bear that are made of iron. The fae world burns at the touch of iron, and I was hoping Satterly would opt for a weapon made of that. I particularly wanted the Pontiac LeMans to come into greater use than it did. I love muscle cars and this novel seemed like a good place to put the pedal to the metal.

Thankfully, this fantasy novel isn't the start of some trilogy or series. At least, not a series that demands readers immediately pick up the next novel. Hopefully Sturges will write another. I enjoyed the characters well enough and got to know them, and the world is a place I'd like to explore again.

I read tons of fantasy and science fiction, and this book was far from unreadable, but I wouldn't call it good. The pacing is decent, and the world is fascinating. Some of the concepts are fresh takes on standard tropes and archtypes - and in that I need to give the author credit. However, the overall story tries too hard to be mysterious, when straight-forward probably would have been better. It's simply difficult to follow at times and it reads like we're constantly missing something. Almost as if it would have been better if it were about 50% longer (eek - I can't believe I just wrote that!) The bland prose doesn't help the overall process, and the POV is awkward (you spend too much time rapidly shifting between characters' heads).

The story seems cool, but the ending is very trite where it isn't plain confusing. This book would probably be better in a graphic novel format as the depth of character and complexity of story is just surface-level caliber and much better suited to accompany artwork. It wasn't horrible, but I can't honestly recommend this book. There was nothing within that had a wow factor.