From Amazon.com
Winter Rose begins as the seemingly simple story of Rois and Laurel Melior and their understandable fascination with young Corbet Lynn, returned to rebuild his abandoned ancestral home, Lynn Hall. Laurel is drawn to Corbet's beauty, Rois to the mystery of his past. But the past holds more than one mystery, and as Rois fights her way into the wood around Lynn Hall, seeking answers for herself, Laurel, and Corbet, she risks losing everything, for all of them, forever.
Traces of Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, of Tam Lin, and of a dozen other legends and tales color Rois's story. Patricia McKillip's consummate mastery of language means that every word counts in a complex, sweetly painful story of human love and timeless, indifferent power.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Woods-wise and free-spirited, Rois Melior is the opposite of her sensible sister, Laurel. But both Rois, who narrates, and Laurel fall under the spell of the stranger who enters their world. Decades ago, according to village gossip, Tearle Lynn murdered his father and mysteriously disappeared. Now Tearle's son, Corbet, has come home to rebuild crumbling Lynn Hall. Despite her attraction to Corbet, Rois is warned by her otherworldly senses that he is not what he seems. As Laurel falls hard for Corbet, Rois searches for the truth about the Lynns, but the answers she finds lead only to more questions. When Corbet disappears, Laurel begins to sicken and fade. To save her sister as well as Corbet, Rois will have to come to terms with the secret of her own changeling identity. The pace here is deliberate and sure, with no false steps; the writing is richly textured and evocative. McKillip (The Book of Atrix Wolf, and winner in 1975 of a World Fantasy Award for her novel The Forgotten Beasts of Eld) weaves a dense web of desire and longing, human love and inhuman need.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
