Book Review

 I recently finished reading "Love Begins in Winter," a collection of five short stories by Simon Van Booy. I really enjoyed the author’s writing style, with short choppy sentences broken by one twisting, long one with semicolons. Lots of similes and metaphors and strange contrasts. It read very poetically with a strong sense of rhythm. I liked his portrayal of characters, how each of them had some kind of darkness beneath their surface. Each story weaved together threads of parents, children, guilt, and hope to form a mosaic that, when viewed from afar once finished with the book, really showed the intensity and power of love to change a person.

Overall Rating: 4.5 out of 5 

Excerpts:

(12): “They will only be my parents once. They are the only parents I will ever have in the history of the universe. I wonder if they feel me thinking about them here in Quebec City in the rain – I wonder if they feel me like a small animal gnawing at them affectionately.”

(48): “From my pocket I took a large stone and set it squarely in his open hand. If there is such a thing as marriage, it takes place long before the ceremony: in a car on the way to the airport; or as a gray bedroom fills with dawn, one lover watching the other; or as two strangers stand together in the rain with no bus in sight, arms weighed down with shopping bags. You don’t know then. But later you realize – that was the moment."