The Winters' Tale

"In The Winters’ Tale, Caroline Philipbar creates a rich tapestry of the life of Constance/Connie Winters. For much of the novel, Connie revels in the company of her second husband and the love of her life, Robert Winters, with whom she shares a passion for literature and the arts, for ideas and ideals, for the kind of appreciation of beauty (and grace) as truth, and truth as beauty of which John Keats sang. Connie and Bob are also keenly attached to their family members, especially Connie's son and her favorite niece and their respective children, whom she loves and nurtures.

Unlike eternally beautiful and unchanging young on Keats's urn, however, Connie is a living, breathing woman subject to the losses and disappointments, some grievous, that time and age impose. Among the most telling and touching scenes of The Winters’ Tale are her own approaching winter, as the deep comforts and pleasures of her life are challenged by Bob's growing illness and death, by her disappointments, even heartbreaks, over her son's choices, and, in the world at large, by changes in contemporary tastes, mores, and animating principles.

At the end of the novel, we see Connie embarking on the next stage of her life with a powerful sense of what it takes to move forward despite the "savage sadness" of loss."

Catherine Penner -- Cornell University

-- Caroline Kinzer-Philipbar