Midwinterblood

Product Information

It starts in the year 2073 with the journalist Eric Seven arriving on the island Blessed, in which there are strange rumours about the people. I don’t know if that was because of the writing style, the setting or both but I felt really relaxed after I had finished. How exactly their stories play out and why they are chasing each other across different lives, of course, is the true heart of the book and I won’t spoil that for you. Then the story began to unfold and Marcus Sedgwick swept you away with a love story that defies time and logic. I was immediately sucked into Eric/Merle/Tor's worlds across time of how everything related to each other, and I couldn't get enough.

Part of it comes from the structure itself, divided in small chapters, each story set in a different era as they go back in time.

uzmite bolje Red Shift, gde imate i istu osnovu zapleta i mnogo bolji a svedeniji stil i upečatljivije likove i beskrajno produbljenije poznavanje istorije i mitologije i bol koji vam srce para umesto Sedžvikove blage njanjavosti. We follow a set of people throughout a few thousand years of time, not keeping one single gender the whole way through, and their interactions do change from lifetime to lifetime. The novel in its entirety is the story of two lovers, each born again in seven different incarnations on the same small island, struggling to find each other and achieve some kind of happiness together across the centuries.

Absolutely luminous and definitely one of my favorites of 2013 so far, "Midwinterblood" is out February 5, 2013 through Macmillan in North America, so definitely be sure to check it out when you get the chance! I was more interested in the mysteries of the island and its secretive inhabitants than the love story between the two MC's. I'm not sure that everyone will enjoy this, as theme, plot and structure are all so strange, but it's a short and compelling read, so I'd definitely recommend that you take a look. Midwinterblood is an acquired taste, for I think not many readers will be inclined to claim it as a favorite.

My first reaction was to think of CLOUD ATLAS, but the more I read this story, the more I found myself racing through the pages, I began to realize it was something else entirely. There's a lot of weighted mood here, a lot of pain, but all of it is crafted into something absolutely stellar.

Been somewhere that has felt totally familiar even though you've never been there before, or felt that you've known someone even though you are meeting them for the first time? Professionally, being a 4th grade teacher and reviewer, not a librarian, I tend to read only YA that really intrigues me for one reason or another and I have to shamefully admit that until now what I’d heard about Marcus Sedgwick’s books — that they were dark and creepy — did not make me want to read them. Poe's story, as well as his own fascination with technique, provided that final piece of the puzzle. Eric cared far more about his painting/art than Merle and Merle cared more about the apples she found. Anyway, when he was dying he promised to live seven lives in total (why not eight or nine or twenty?Midwinterblood is broken up into seven different stories, about an archaelogist, a pilot, a painter, a ghost, a vampire, and a viking. Tor claimed that Melle and Eirik were his children because their father was infertile (too much dragon orchid beer will do that). We are sometimes several pages into the story before we realise who Eric and Merle are in each incarnation, but continuity is guaranteed not only because the main protagonists keep similar names, but also because of the use of recurring symbols such as the hare. While Sedgwick definitely has a way with sensory imagery and language, its sparseness both contributed to the mystique of this story, of all of the characters and how they tied into each other and the past(using the relationship web school of worldbuilding), and he can describe a whole lot in only a few words, I feel like he could have expanded upon some of that language, characters, and world just a teeny tiny bit more and still retain how gorgeously dark this book was.