Mind of Winter

December 23, 2013
An unknown horror hovers just out of reach in this gripping psychological thriller from Kasischke (The Raising). One snowy Christmas morning in a Detroit suburb, Holly Judge and her 15-year-old daughter, Tatiana, prepare for the holiday while her husband, Eric Clare, drives to the airport to fetch his aging parents. The day reminds Holly of a Christmas 13 years earlier, when she and Eric traveled to Siberia to adopt Tatiana, who was then two years old. Holly is now convinced that Tatiana is not the child they first saw. "Something had followed them home from Russia," becomes Holly's mantra, as she blames Tatiana for her stalled writing career and general malaise. Is Tatiana evil or a typical sullen teenager? A storm that grows into a raging blizzard mirrors Holly's intensifying anxiety, turning their isolated home into a haunted house from which there's no escape. Kasischke skillfully mixes an insightful look at a damaged woman with a twisty plot that builds to a shocking ending. Agent: Lisa Bankoff, ICM.

November 15, 2013

Holly, a wife and mother, wakes up on Christmas Day with a hangover and a vague sense of unease, the first of many things that go wrong. She's missed the alarm, and her husband is late to pick up his elderly parents at the airport. Outside, a raging blizzard develops, stranding her husband with his parents. None of the invited houseguests will risk the drive to their house for the holiday dinner, leaving Holly alone with her beautiful adopted Russian daughter, Tatiana, or Tatty, who is going through a particularly sullen adolescent phase, driving Holly to distraction. Or is Holly simply one of those annoying clinging mothers? Ordinary household events--preparing a meal, fretting over dropped phone calls, arguing with her daughter--become weighted with sinister significance. Holly's nonstop interior ruminations are agonizing yet fascinating and draw the reader into a search for clues as to what is real and what may be bizarrely delusional. VERDICT Winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for her poetry, Kasischke also writes fine fiction; this novel is up for France's Prix Medicis etranger, and Kasischke's writing has been compared to that of Joyce Carol Oates. Like Mona Simpson (Anywhere but Here), Kasischke vividly depicts a woman's tormented inner world. [See Prepub Alert, 10/21/13.]--Reba Leiding, formerly with James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2014
Author and poet Kasischke (If a Stranger Approaches You, 2013, etc.) chronicles the ramblings of a woman snowed in with her adopted daughter on Christmas Day. Holly and her husband, Eric, adopted beautiful Tatiana from a cold, impersonal Russian orphanage when she was a toddler. The little girl with the blue-tinged skin, glossy black hair, and huge, dark eyes adjusted quickly to the love and attention showered upon her by her new family, but when they all oversleep on Christmas morning, the day grows exceptionally strange. Eric rushes out in a blizzard to fetch his elderly parents from the airport, while Holly and Tatty--as they call their daughter--try to put dinner on the table for their guests, which include Eric's brothers and their wives and some family friends. But something is different about this day: Holly awakens to the idea that something followed them home from Russia, and she keeps trying to hold on to that idea in order to write it down. And Tatty, despite having overslept, keeps taking long naps. She also makes strange appearances in which both her clothes and personality change. Then there's Holly's phone, which rings often but conceals the identity of the caller and transmits odd messages. Holly, the sole narrator of the story, is a poet with writer's block, but in Kasischke's hands, she becomes a buzzing mosquito, obsessing over every decision, no matter how small and inconsequential. The story's most fascinating moments occur when the author decamps to Siberia in the days before and during Tatty's adoption. The rich and heartbreaking details surrounding the orphanage and the adoption process provide interesting insight into both Holly and Tatty. But the author's favored technique of taking random thoughts and dwelling on them for pages on end makes for some thin and often frustrating prose. A prolonged exercise in navel-gazing, with a powerful ending that may be redemptive in the eyes of readers who stick around.

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Starred review from December 1, 2013
Holly Judge wakes up on Christmas morning knowing Something had followed them home from Russia. Trapped at home with her teenage daughter during a blizzard, Holly's thoughts drift back to the trips she and her husband took to Siberia's Pokrovka Orphanage #2 to adopt baby Tatiana. Versions of those visits change as the day progresses. Holly's slow revelations about what drove her to adopt and her own family history cause the reader to become even more suspicious of Holly's increasingly confused descriptions of the day's events. Whatever happened in Russia, something, or someone, in that house is not right. The slow, cold menace in the book is palpable. As a reader, you know that something horrible is going to be revealedsomething awful and inevitable. And, when you finally force yourself to turn that last page, it will not be a scream that gets caught in your throat, but a gut-punching, heart-wrenching sob. A book that will haunt you for days and long, long nights after reading.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)