The Snow Gypsy by Lindsay Jayne Ashford

2.5 Stars

I was really disappointed with this novel, having read a couple of others by this author I was really looking forward to this one.  As a departure from her previous fare this book does not seek to fictionalise a real persons life but is about wholly fictional characters set against a back drop of fact.  Well, fact to a point there is a lot of very shaky Spanish Civil War history and Gypsy cultural history.  I think it is the shakiness of these foundations that ultimately spoilt my enjoyment of the novel.

The characters never really seem to be anything other than words on a page.  With all that has happened to Lola (witnessing a massacre as a teenager, raising an abandoned child, living with the fear of oppression) I never felt that I really knew her.  Now, this would be fine if she was supposed to be an enigmatic character but we are supposed to feel empathy towards this person as a major supporting character but she is nothing more than a series of unfortunate events upon a page.  Rose, our central character, is much the same.  We do get to share some of her feelings surrounding the disappearance of her brother but only superficially, the author doesn't take the reader in to Rose's world merely allowing us to stand on the sidelines and watch events unfold.

That is the other problem there is so much going on here that remains unexplored.  Instead of settling on the historical event that led us to this point in time and then a major event for each woman to deal with in the present it is a constant stream of events.  This means that nothing is really explored on the page and the reader can never truly become immersed in the world.  Perhaps the worst handled is Lola's experience after returning home from the Fiesta, it is told in great detail what happened to her but then her way out of the situation seems merely glossed over; for me this was an opportunity missed.

On the whole plot and characterisation let this book down completely and as they are the main things I look for in a read then this was not for me at all.  Such a shame as I know this author is capable of writing both in such a way that you get completely sucked in.