Midwinterblood

Beautiful, beautiful. Somehow spare and dense at the same time, it asks questions about fate, love and sacrifice without giving any easy answers. The narrative moves like a current, each little tale it's own island and I am swept up and out to sea again.

What an extraordinary book! Marcus Sedgwick is the master of suspenseful, folklore-related tale telling, and in Midwinterblood he weaves Vikings and ancient blood sacrifice with a 20th century painting and a love story that defies time.
It is a series of beautifully written, connected stories that each encapsulate perfectly the different time settings as we follow the lovers back into pre-history. I particularly appreciated the folksong (there's a great version of it by Bellowhead by the way), and the Viking scald's saga.
The use of langauge throughout is brilliant and subtle - there's a great deal there to find and enjoy, like the changes in the island's name - Blessed in the present and future, Blest a little further back, but Bloed show more when the Vikings lived there.
Lovely to read simply as a love story, this is a book that (as is always the case with the best storytelling) can take the curious reader on a fascinating journey beyond its covers.
Make sure you look up the picture Midvinterblot http://tinyurl.com/ches8s4 show less

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Actual rating: ALL the stars.

After reading White Crow by Marcus Sedgwick last year, I knew he was an author I'd have to look out for. White Crow was simply stunning. It was horrifying and brutal and beautiful, and I just knew that Sedgwick's work was special. Now, after finishing Midwinterblood he is my new favorite author.

That's right, I went there. Marcus Sedgwick is my favorite author, and really he should be yours too.

Midwinterblood is seven short stories, spanning over centuries, all set on the Scandinavian island, Blessed. Each story is a totally different beast from the next one, but they are all connected by the island and other common threads. There is the tale of a show more journalist sent to investigate the rumors of the immortal Blessed citizens; an older painter wasting away from grief; a fighter pilot; a viking; an archeologist; and more. Each was a fascinating read and I kept trying to figure out the connection, to get to the very root of the story and to finally, finally piece together the real identities of Merle and Eric.

The writing in Midwinterblood was phenomenal, masterful. Sedgwick has a way of writing horror that is not gory or in your face. It's a subtle kind of terrifying, where the unknown is somehow even more horrible than what is there in front of you. More than once my heart was beating out of chest, and yet nothing scary had actually happened: it was the anticipation and the mystery, the wanting to know, but not really wanting to know, for the truth might be even worse than the imagined.

When I finally came to the end of the novel and all the tiny pieces clicked into place I was in shock. And awe. It was so beautiful and so final and so open all at the same time. I don't remember the last time I felt so wowed by an ending. But it was like putting together a puzzle and not knowing what it's supposed to look like; then suddenly, and not until you put that last piece in its spot, it's all bright and vivid and so, so rewarding.

Fans of horror, reincarnation, historical fiction, and love tested by time will adore Sedgwick's Midwinterblood. I truly believe this book has something for everyone, and barely passing 250 pages, it is a quick, mysterious book that begs to be read. show less

So when I finished this book, I thought, “Wow.” And then: “What was that?” I’m inclined to say that I loved the book, but when I think about it as a whole, it just didn’t come together. I loved the atmospheric, mythic tone and setting. It’s obviously meticulously constructed, and there’s a part of me that lauds it for that alone—the symbolism, recurring motifs, foreshadowing, and other literary devices. The first section shocked and intrigued me. Individually, I enjoyed almost every section. But the stories and devices—I don’t’ know that they came together to create anything meaningful. There’s virtually no character development. The stories never reach any depth. It goes backwards, so you spend the much of show more your time reading it confused, trying to figure out what’s going on, and in the end, one part is mostly explained, but a lot of questions remain unanswered. If such pains were taken to include ____ in every section, what did it mean? Why was it there? Who is this person? Why is he only in two sections? How did society on the island go from this to that? What is the mythology here? Etc etc etc. I found the world, the people, the societies Sedgwick created fascinating, but I still know almost nothing about them! So I liked this book a lot, but I think it’s not as good as it seems. It’s impressively literary, especially at first glance, but on closer inspection at the work as a whole, it doesn’t hold up. show less

I have a love/hate relationship with Marcus Sedgwick's books. I love My Swordhand is Singing with an intense passion; Revolver and The Book of Dead Days, not so much. I tend to approach with caution and his books get pushed down my to-be-read list easily. That said, I really enjoyed Midwinterblood! The short vignettes all tied together by a common thread through time were engrossing. I especially liked the story of the archaeologist. Each story added a piece to the bigger puzzle and, at the end, the reader looks back over a large landscape, seeing the patterns merge and form a whole, like the painting. A great read.

What did I just read? A romance with horror? A horrific romance? A book about past lives? It is a book about sacrifice, and how love can span time, and how terrible that can be. Clear and beautiful prose--it is a book that can't be defined. Why they HELL is it labeled YA?

I had been delaying writing this review because I was trying to figure out my own reaction to the book. There is a lot good in the book - the linked stories have just enough subtlety in the connections between them to make them well done and just enough independence to make them work on their own, the reversed timeline is pulled off masterfully. But it also has its weak points - the epilogue does not feel like it belongs to the book and I am still not sure why this is classified as YA - it looks like a cop out to allow shallowly built characters and more coincidences than one would accept in an adult book. And I would not be so unhappy of the latter if the book was not actually pretty good - it could have worked as an adult book with show more very little change.

But let's go back to the story - somewhere out there, there is an island where a special flower is grown - a flower that can extend people's life but it also makes them forget things. The 7 stories in the novel go back in time in the lives of two lovers - they died in their first life but always find themselves - sometimes as lovers, sometimes as friends. There is a ghost story and an archeological dig, a picture and a magically hidden part of the island, vampires and vikings. One story leads into another and the connections are built with a mastery that makes me wonder why it was not extended to building the characters as well. We follow an archeologist finding a bomb and a grave, in the next stories we learn how they ended up there; we will see a picture and then we will see it painted and then we will see how the actual scene happened. It starts with a sacrifice and it ends with one - despite the centuries between the two, it is one and the same. Time makes a full circle and one wonders if it will be just one.

The start of the novel is mundane - a journalist is sent to an island that seems to be weird and special; an island where he will meet a woman that seems to be his destiny. He needs to forget and he needs to remember. The end of the novel, without the epilogue is lyrical and fitting. The epilogue is useless and although it seems to be built to tie the stories together, it manages to sound condescending and totally out of style.

The prose weaves between simple (even simplistic) and lyrical. I can see why it won awards for YA novels but I also wonder what could have been if Sedgwick had written it as a proper novel - it could have stood as one. And I am not sure how fair it is to have this kind of a mish-mash called YA - it has the same issues as most of the YA books but it also has elements that put it on top of them.

At the end, it is a readable novel - somewhere between YA and adult literature. A lost opportunity in so many ways despite the awards it had won - it's not YA except by name but it does not get to the level of a good adult fiction either. show less