I started this a day early, apparently, but I don't think that explains why I didn't care much for this book. Winter's Tale is something like a John Irving novel, written while tripping on acid after having read juvenile fantasy books. Okay, so it's not that bad. The prose is clean, but mostly uninspired; there are no descriptions that jump off the page like some of the ones in Memoir From Antproof Case did.

Some people adore this book, and I can in part see why. It's a breezy read with a large number of fairly interesting characters and quite a lot of creative reality twists. On the down side, I didn't find the overall plotting of the book to be very coherent, and there are far too many characters that aren't quite "minor", even for a near 700 page novel. My main frustration stems from the fact that there were so many promising elements in this novel that never became coherent.