Red Winter
Nov. 16th, 2015 11:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearRed Winter is a book by Dan Smith, and my connection to Dan Smith (and how I got a copy of the book) is a little odd. He was the judge one time for the weekly Hour of Writes competition - and he picked me as the winner! The story in question was an only slightly fictionalised version of the trip Dave and I took up a mountain in Switzerland earlier this year. Now, Dan Smith writes thrillers, and his assumption at the start of the story was that the character representing Dave was going to kill the character representing me (what this says about my presentation of our marriage is best not analysed...), but he turned out not to be disappointed when this wasn't the case, and he still awarded me the victory.
Anyway, my prize was a signed copy of one of his books - Red Winter - which subsequently turned up in the post. It's not the sort of book I would normally read, so it's languished in my book pile for some months, but I finally got round to it - and it's actually really good. It tells the story of Kolya, a Russian soldier who deserts from his faction in the winter of 1920 and travels to his home village, only to discover his family has been kidnapped by a rogue revolutionary. He spends the rest of the book tracking them down, meeting various people along the way. The plot is thin, it's pretty gory and almost unrelentingly grim - so not really my kind of book at all.
However, the richness of the description and the depth of the characterisation are amazing. For an uncomplicated story, it's masterfully told, and it absorbed me fully throughout. I think I could learn a lot from Mr Smith, since I have been told my own writing can be somewhat lacking in description - so if I want my own work to be more involving, I could do worse than taking some tips from him.
Anyway, my prize was a signed copy of one of his books - Red Winter - which subsequently turned up in the post. It's not the sort of book I would normally read, so it's languished in my book pile for some months, but I finally got round to it - and it's actually really good. It tells the story of Kolya, a Russian soldier who deserts from his faction in the winter of 1920 and travels to his home village, only to discover his family has been kidnapped by a rogue revolutionary. He spends the rest of the book tracking them down, meeting various people along the way. The plot is thin, it's pretty gory and almost unrelentingly grim - so not really my kind of book at all.
However, the richness of the description and the depth of the characterisation are amazing. For an uncomplicated story, it's masterfully told, and it absorbed me fully throughout. I think I could learn a lot from Mr Smith, since I have been told my own writing can be somewhat lacking in description - so if I want my own work to be more involving, I could do worse than taking some tips from him.
