14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Shows his age...., May 2, 2006
This review is from: The Snow Garden (Mass Market Paperback)
Christopher Rice's second novel is everything that you expect from a young, precocious and ambitious author. Problem is, that is NOT a good thing. While "The Snow Garden" does have a fair amount going for it - as a mystery, the final third kicks into high gear - the book leans heavily towards pretentious. While, as a gay man, I like that gay characters can be presented as protagonists, Rice seems more intent on making them mouthpieces for his own philosophies. And please, spare me any more writings that think all straight guys will go down if they just meet the right man? Augh!
But it also means that you are slogging through two thirds of a mystery that plods like flip-flops in the slush. Some of the twists are more than a little preposterous (the disappearance of Jesse made me stop and double-back to see if I'd missed something), characters underdeveloped and hackneyed, unnecessary sub-plots slip in and are discarded, and as others have noted, the proof-readers of my hardback edition must have been tipping at the Scotch too often. Genders switch, as does a character name at one point. Forget minor errors, this was the speed reading equivalent of nailing a pot-hole. Quite frankly, if there wasn't a famous last name attached here (hey, it was what first drew me in), "The Snow Garden" would likely be spoken of as a sophomore outing by a promising writer who needed to lose the pretensions. Here's hoping Christopher Rice does a little woodshedding before book three.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
There is a good story in here somewhere...., December 6, 2003
Christopher Rice's writing has nothing to do with his mother, the notorious Anne Rice. There, it's said. They have two totally separate styles of writing and different ways of establishing mood - Anne's is a florid and descriptive style, Christopher appears to rely more on enigmatic character interaction to set the mood. That is all, no arguing.
Now, on with the review. 'The Snow Garden' tells the story of Randall and Kathryn, two friends from college, each struggling to come to terms with dark secrets from their respective troubled pasts. Part coming-of-age tale, part murder-mystery, part gay in-jokes and stereotyping, a potentially strong narrative becomes mired and wasted in what is essentially 400+ pages of overly emotive dialogue.
As a second novel, 'The Snow Garden' isn't too bad, being neither better nor worse than his first, 'A Destiny of Souls'. The principal characters, too, are of a type - tortured, moody, self-important adolescents with tangible egos - but are clearly identifiable. Shame, then, that Rice hasn't made them in the slightest bit endearing, opting instead for an almost comedic stereotyping. There are traces here and there of a strong narrative, stemming from a very well-concieved murder-mystery, but unfortunately a decent idea for a plot can't compensate for the cast of thousands of thoroughly soulless, one-dimensional characters.
The problem with Rice's second novel is that after a hundred pages or so, we begin to feel a sense of what is unmistakably a personal vendetta - Rice wants us desperately to agree with his apparently personal views on pansexuality - and this is where the novel begins to grind to a halt. Rehashing the same experiences for all of his characters over and over again, reading Rice's words becomes a chore, and it really isn't until the final fifty pages or so that anything major happens in the story, by which time we're scanning paragraphs so quickly that we don't really care. The sub-plot explaining why Kathryn is so emotionally stunted is not properly explored, with the most cursory of nods to why she feels the way she does. Randall's past (and the whole climax of the book) comes to light in such a stagey, theatrical fashion that it rings totally false, and we cannot easily believe that a teen with such a dramatic life could now be so totally unengaging. He drinks and smokes, presumably to indicate a sense of living-on-the-edge cool, but Rice never seems to give us a decent, believable reason for it.
In face, it's this proposed sense of gritty, urbane coolness that is the major flaw with 'The Snow Garden'. We can't believe that these characters could have come from anywhere other than a spoiled, upper-class background, and we like them all the less for it. Beverly Hills 9021-snore. Hopefully, future novels won't be crammed full of pedantic and unbelievable characters, and Rice's essentially sound plotlines will be allowed to shine through.
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