Solstice Wood

Sylvia practically ran from her home in rural New York, where she had been raised by her grandparents, the first chance she got, never looking back and always with an excuse as to why she couldn't return. The time for running is over now. Her grandfather has died, and Sylvia has no choice but to return to Lynn Hall, and to the searching eyes of her grandmother. Lynn Hall hides many mysteries, her grandmother keeper of them. Sylvia keeps her own secrets though, holding the answer to a mystery her whole village has been trying to answer since she was born. But now she must face not only the secrets that she and her grandmother hide, but also the dangers lurking in the woods behind Lynn Hall. The dangers that first compelled her to flee to show more her city of concrete on the other side of the country rather than face them for another day.

Patricia McKillip writes with a beautiful, lyrical quality. Her words have a haunting tone, almost poetic, filled with depth and emotion. She doesn't just write, she paints a picture in prose. I haven't been able to get one such sentence out of my mind. "Then I heard Owen's sonorous voice, quoting Tennyson - From the great deep, to the great deep he goes - and I wanted to wail like a winter wind and sit by myself in a blizzard until I was covered with snow and no one could find me again." The words are filled with such raw emotion, that I couldn't help but feel them, experience them myself. I wish I could better express how highly I think of her ability to compose words into something greater than a simple story. It's entirely understandable why she has won several awards, including the 1997 Mythopoeic Award for this novel.

Beyond her impressive skill at setting pen to paper, McKillip has created a very enjoyable modern day fairy tale. I'm always fascinated by any fairy tale, be it old or new. I'm particularly impressed that she took a more traditionalist approach to it. McKillip's fairies aren't the cute little creatures with wings like Disney's Tinkerbell. Instead she has drawn upon history, sketching us a portrait of them that ancient people would recognize. One in which faires are dark and dangerous creatures who are for more likely to lure a child into the woods and replace them with a changeling than sprinkle you with pixie dust so that you can follow the second star on the right.

This wasn't an overly long novel at 277 pages. Normally when I read novels of this length, I find myself wanting more. I admit that I'm a sucker for long novels, wordy and descriptive. This time I have to say I don't feel shortchanged at all. The length was perfect. The writing beautiful. The story enchanting. I can't ask for much more than that. show less

This story is about a close knit community that lives on the boundary between our world and fairy. The Lynn family is entrusted to keep the fairy world from spilling into our world. They live in their ancestral home, Lynn Hall. The grandmother, Iris, along with the ladies of the local fiber guild, stitches the doorways to the otherworld closed. She doesn't realize that her own granddaughter is part fey. She has closed off her relationship with her granddaughter by believing all fey are evil and need to be kept out. The book is about family and friends and the ties that bind.

The story is told from the point of view of each character; Sylvia who feels trapped between worlds, Iris who hates the fey, Owen who is in love with a fey woman but show more is bound to protect the Lynn family, and Tyler who is a teenager and feels he doesn’t fit in without his father who understood him.

Glamour is always a theme in fairy stories. You can never be sure of what you see. Iris can’t see that Sylvia is half of what she despises. Iris can’t see that her friend Owen is in love with a fey woman. Her hatred has blinded her from seeing her family and friends.

Another theme is loss and it is what eventually brings everyone together. The story begins with the death of Liam Lynn, Iris’s husband, which brings the family and community together for the funeral. Tyler feels lost without his father. Sylvia feels lost because she doesn’t know what world she belongs in. Owen falls in love with Rue because his wife has left him. It's this feeling of loss that brings the family together and brings the mortals and fey together. show less

Solstice Wood follows Winter Rose, set several generations in the future, with the main character being a distant descendant of Rois, who was the main character in Winter Rose. This book almost has the same feel as the first–very much set in nature and has a dreamy, misty sort of atmosphere to it; however, because it’s grounded in present-day I think that it’s a lot easier to buy into right from the beginning than the first one is. Sylvia comes home to go to her grandfather’s funeral and re-discovers the place where she grows up, a place that is haunted by stories of fae and magic and half fae-children.

It’s a story about self-discovery and identity, especially our identity in relation to our ancestors. Sylvia knows that show more she’s half fae–half of the very type of being that her grandmother tries so hard to protect the town from, and has a hard time with it, because she doesn’t want to cause a disturbance, but has a hard time being comfortable in her grandmother’s home because of it. What Sylvia doesn’t realize is that the town has a lot of other secrets; a guild her grandmother runs that knits and crotchets and sews magic into the town to try to keep the fae out; other people who are just as fae as Sylvia; and those who are in love with fae people and who find ways around the boundaries that are sewn into the town.

It’s an enjoyable book, a bit slow-paced, but a really nice story overall. We get the perspectives of Sylvia, Sylvia’s grandmother, and Sylvia’s cousin. Watching how their stories intertwine into something bigger is a joy to read. I also like how many parallels there are to the first book without being repetitive or redundant. I really like McKillip’s take on the world of fae and how they work/think, and I love how Rois’s experience has completely colored everything the town thinks and believes about the fae. It’s a nice lesson on how one incidence can change an entire town for generations in terms of their beliefs and attitudes.

Because I appreciated it so much in relation to the first one, I’m not sure how enjoyable it would be without reading the first book. While I think the story itself stands on its own, the characters’ journey depends so much on the understanding of Rois’s experiences that I’m not sure how well it would translate.

I enjoyed this book a lot, but like the first one, I don’t think it’s for everyone. It’s a slow and quiet story. If you like fae stories, you would probably enjoy this.

Also posted on Purple People Readers. show less

What a beautiful, lovely book. Solstice Wood is a wonderful blend of the mundane and the mystical, all tied up through misunderstanding.

Two worlds collided badly in McKillip's Winter Rose and in this book, generations later the reverberrations of that are still present. After Rois Melior won Corbett Lynn back from the queen of the winter wood, spells and guardians were put in place to keep the wood folk away and contained.

If you follow tradition and the path set down by your forebears, is there ever room to re-evaluate the situation and see if perhaps, it is time for tradition to change.

This, really, is the crux of Solstice Wood. It is beautifully told through differing first person point of view characters. This manner of writing seems show more odd to me at first, until I realised that all of them had a different view on the same truth and only together could the full story be told and understood.

McKillip's lyrical writing still shines, but in this modern world tale, it is tempered with the everyday, and I think this probably makes Solstice Wood more accessible to the causal reader. I love the way she writes - I always imagined I would like to "write like Patricia McKillip, but less obscure" and that's how this book feels. It's still weaves magic with words, but I feel much more like I understood the story than I sometimes do at the end of one of her books.

This book makes a much deeper, emotional sense if you've read Winter Rose, but it still works alone. All the same, I'd say read both. Why miss out on another good story. show less

Here's my review from June 2007:

"Bookshop owner Sylvia returns to the family home she's avoided since she was a teen. Confronted with her loving family once more, Sylvia begins to realize that her grandmother is much more than she seems--and that the local sewing circle is far more powerful than she ever dreamed. Their stitches protect the human world from encroachment by the faery world. But when Sylvia's cousin is kidnapped by the fey, she is forced to confront her own prejudices. This is a much more grounded book than McKillip's recent work, which I liked."

I rated it four stars at the time, but now I've reread it in 2014 and feel the need to knock my rating down. I didn't realize this was a reread until I got 200 pages in, when it show more started to feel faintly familiar. I've probably read over a thousand books since I last read this, but it's still not a good sign that I didn't remember pretty much anything from it. The characters each have distinctive hair colors, from ivory to flame to gold, but somehow their POV chapters all blend together. Which is not to say I liked nothing; McKillip has a way with words:

Everything made me want to cry. But I couldn't; tears wouldn't come out. It was stuck inside me, this nasty, monsterish feeling, of something so uncomfortable I couldn't stand it, but I couldn't get rid of it, either. All I could do was hunker down around it, feeling it grow and grow as memories collected, and feeling myself turn into a troll, something surly and mean and snarling, my dank skin growing burls and warts, hoping nobody would come near me because my voice would flare out of me like a welder's fire.

It's a great description of teen angst and grief, and I love that Tyler's own darkest feelings are his best protection against the feys' glamors and enticements. And I love the fairy-tale logic Sylvia employs, and the ambiguity of the fairy queen's actions. show less

I thought this was absolutely delightful. I was sorry that my copy of Winter Rose wasn't available to reread before I started, but I don't think doing so would have increased my enjoyment of this new story. Although it is a sequel of sorts to Winter Rose, this story is much more grounded in the modern world, with cars and airplanes and mobile phones. I found it a tiny bit jarring for the first page or so, but I quickly became as entranced as ever with Ms. McKillip's writing.

Ms. McKillip's Mythopoeic style, in books such as the Forgotten Beasts of Eld, and Alphabet of Thorn, and her intensely evocative use of language, make her one of my favourite authors. But I did enjoy the more modern/realistic style used in this novel.

I think it show more would appeal to fans of Charles de Lint. show less

I sent the tears back in a hot wave towards my heart, where love and grief tangled so tightly you couldn’t even separate a single thread to begin to unravel them.

When I finished Patricia McKillip’s Winter Rose, I found myself longing for a more straightforward look at the world she created. Mostly, I wanted to learn more about the wood—that dark, fantastic realm that held doorways between two worlds.

Well, I got my wish. Sort of.

I wanted her to explore the wood: I hadn’t meant for her to tame it.

Solstice Wood is not a sequel in a conventional sense, but a modern-day story that shares the setting and magical forces of Winter Rose. One does not have to read the other book first in order to enjoy this one, but it certainly enriches show more some of the references. On the other hand, reading the newer story directly after the older one might cause some frustration, as it did for me, simply because McKillip turns everything from the first book on its head.

Liam Lynn, master of Lynn Hall, has just passed away, and all the relatives find themselves returning once again to their childhood home to attend his funeral. Sylvia, his granddaughter and heir, puts work in her bookstore on hold, and comes back to face a secret inside her that she had fled from long ago. Her cousin Tyler, a gangling, geeky teenager, is still coping with the shock of his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage. Liam’s widow Iris is already there, bitterly grieving over Liam while doing her best to protect Lynn Hall from the magic that has threatened to break through to it for centuries. Other characters people the tale: Owen Avery, sworn to look after the Lynns but harboring secrets of his own; his daughter Dorian, Syl’s childhood friend; and Leith Rowan, Dorian’s enigmatic fiancé.

I mention the characters up front mostly because they serve as a way of structuring the work, many of them narrating their own chapters in the book; in reality, they aren’t all that interesting, especially compared to the fascinating individuals found in McKillip’s other works. Sylvia is supposed to be our heroine, but she’s a pale figure at best, quickly becoming lost in the general milieu. I couldn’t care less for Owen Avery and his fairy lover, or Gram’s Fiber Guild. I felt the same way about Ty at the beginning of the book, simply because his relationship with Judith Coyle gets off to such an odd start (I don’t think even girls training to be wood witches randomly stand under strangers’ windows and beckon for them to come down and talk to them), but he seems more “real” than many of the others. Leith Rowan is also interesting, if a little underused, and I liked the changeling who the Lady of the Wood sends to take Tyler’s place in our world—his devotion to the Lady is sad and ill-fated. But by far the best characterization McKillip achieves here occurs in Chapter Four, when Iris suffers through the preparations for and aftermath of Liam’s funeral. The passage with which I open this review comes from that chapter: it’s an intense and poetic exploration of one woman’s sorrow, and is the kind of deft, soulful writing McKillip excels at.

There are some pacing issues here. The Lady of the Wood comes onto the scene as early as Chapter Three, and her appearance has no shock value or mystique. She just sort of shows up, reminds Syl of her connection to the wood and the otherworld, and disappears. Similarly, the notion that a covey of human witches could close the portals to Faerieland, while interesting, robs the Wood of all of its power. The magical forces in this story have none of the beauty or danger one wants or expects after Winter Rose.

The fairly uninteresting characters, poorly paced plot, and inoffensive magic cause me to send this to the bottom of the list when it comes to McKiliip recommendations. For completists only. show less