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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An enchanting fantasy, July 10, 2001
This review is from: Once Upon a Winter's Night (Roc Fantasy) (Hardcover)
Camille, the youngest of six daughters with a younger ailing brother, lives with her impoverished family near the end of the human world and the start of the fairy realm. She finds happiness singing while working in the field and playing games with her brother. The six female siblings have little hope for marriage because there is no money for a dowry. However, everything changes when a bear arrives at their hovel. The bear carries a message from Prince Alain of Summerwood stating he wishes to marry Camille and if his proposal is accepted he will pay a bride price that will leave her family in modest luxury. Camille and her brother say no, but the rest of her kin accept. Camille gives in when she realizes her brother can obtain needed medicine. Camille rides the bear through Springwood to Winterwood to Autumnwood until she finally reaches her destination of Summerwood. There she meets Prince Alain who wears a mask. Still, Camille and Alain begin to fall in love, but she tries to lift the curse that is destroying him without realizing the consequences of her actions. Still, she willingly will go into hell if need be to rescue her beloved. ONCE UPON A WINTER'S NIGHT is a superb adult fairy tale that children of all ages will enjoy. The story line is charming and magical as it takes readers on quite a ride in the realm of Fairy. Camille is a great female protagonist and the melancholy Alain, who finds brief respites with his beloved, is an enigmatic hero. Dennis McKiernan escorts fantasy lovers into an enchanted place that deserves more tales, perhaps those starring Alain's siblings and even a prequel starring his parents. Harriet Klausner
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25 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Stop before it's too late., February 24, 2004
This review is from: Once Upon a Winter's Night (Roc Fantasy) (Hardcover)
Bite me, this book was bad. And I mean bad in the sense that I was faced with a decision:read this thing all the way through or be hit on by the greasy would-be Lothario sitting next to me on the long bus ride home. Even now I'm not sure which was preferable. As a rule of thumb I adore fairy tales, and I was very excited when I discovered this in the book store. But cheese'n'rice this was awful. Characters? Heck no, we don't need characters - all we need is shallow cardboard cut-outs with vague generlizations of personality. The heroine is beautiful, blonde, and nice, the hero is mysterious and handsome, the heroine's mother is greedy and her father is meek. Forget any sense of intelligence, charm, wit, humor, warmth, or sincerity that make characters worth following. When she wasn't being beautiful or kind, Camille, our lady heroine, was displaying such stupidity and lack of back bone I found myself cheering for the villian. With a year and a day to search before her beloved prince is lost to her, Camille wanders around aimlessly on the hope she'll find someone to tell her where she's going. Again and again she asks if the frog/sorceress/giant lizard-eating alien knows of a place 'west of the sun and east of the moon', and when she's told no, she weeps, faints, whines, moans. It starts to seem like she's doing everything she can not to look for him. Also, a word about the dialogue. No one speaks like this. I understand that the setting is fantastical and the people live in a time beyond recorded history, but even people then didn't speak in the convoluted, tongue twisting, awkward babble this cast spews. You get the feeling it would take these people twenty minutes to pass the butter. "My lord, do forgive me for my impertinece but I must beg a favor of your supreme worshipfulness. The yonder solidified dairy product which sits so daintily by your hand, if it be not troublesome to your lordship, I beg you would deign to pass it forthwith." "My lady, do not fear..." Sheesh. In other words, pick something else. Anything else. Go read The Monster At The End Of This Book, with Grover. At least your brain won't eat itself alive to stop the torment.
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16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
I Once Knew A Girl Named Mary Sue..., June 3, 2005
In case you aren't familiar with the term, I'm going to take a moment to explain what "Mary Sue" means because I have a feeling I'm going to using this phrase of awful lot. A Mary Sue refers to one of those irritating characters that appear in a work of fiction, not as a well balanced characters, but as some sort of overly idealized place holder for the author or reader to live out some vicarious fantasy through. A female Mary Sue usually is an impossibly beautiful and perfect waif with a dramatic name like Auroraphina Westlake. She's dainty and feminine to the point of fainting at her own shadow, she can do anything without exerting any effort, and love, wealth, and all the good things in life just fall into her lap. Every one loves her. Anyone we doesn't think Mary Sue should be cannonized is evil incarnate and lives to make her all teary eyed. That is Mary Sue. That description perfectly fits the main character Camille. Camille starts the story off as a poor girl who lives in shack with her whipped father (who she loves to bits), her shrewish mother, and her bratty sisters who are jealous of Camille. By and large, the female relatives will be punished severly by the end of the novel. Camille is cheerful and basically dances about with her head of la-la land, but lo! one night a bear comes to the cabin with a marriage proposal from Prince Alain of Summerwood. Camille, who frankly doesn't have much going on upstairs, is not at all afraid of marrying some guy she's never meet before and marrying the prince would make the family happy, so off she goes with the bear. They must travel through scary goblin-infested woods and Camille says embarrassing stuff like "Protect me, Oh Bear!" Seriously, people in this novel don't speak so much as make flowerly dramatic declarations like a 3rd grade class trying to do Shakespear.
When she finally meets her groom-to-be, he is this guy who never appears during the day and always wears a mask. Prince Alain is the male equivalent as of the Mary Sue as imagined by a twelve year old girl. Impossibly sauve, perfect, polite, and mysterious, Alain is the mister right fantasy incarnated at its most girliest. They fall instantly in love, and the audience is treated to a scene where they consumate the relationship that made me feel like I was reading the X-rated version of the Carebears. However, even these carnal activities can not lessen the saintly aura of our Mary Sues. However, the happiness is not to last and Camille's stupidity activates a goblin curse and Alain is kidnapped. Camille is left with the task of finding Alain in a year and a day. Camille's quest is just as dull as the romance. Camille is Mary Sue remember, meaning there is no way she can fail. When she's presented with an obstacle she can dues ex-machina up some skill to get around or she gets all teary eyed as some giant, elf stud, or fairy will show up and help her.
All and all, Once Upon a Winter's Night is a boring fantasy novel that feels like something a lonely pre-teen would post of fanfiction.net instead of the work a seasoned fantasy writer. It's tension free, shallow, and bursting at the seams with over-wraught and ridiculous drama. If not for the adult scenes with Alain and Camille this would fit write well in young adult fiction, because frankly I can't imagine anyone other than young girls not being bored to death by Mary Sue.
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