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Title: The Snow Queen

Author: Michael Cunningham

Narrator: Claire Danes

Format: Unabridged

Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-13-14

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

Genres: Fiction, Literary

Publisher's Summary:

Beautiful and heartbreaking, comic and tragic, The Snow Queen once again proves that Michael Cunningham is one of the great novelists of his generation

Michael Cunninghams luminous novel begins with a vision. Its November 2004. Barrett Meeks, having lost love yet again, is walking through Central Park when he is inspired to look up at the sky; there he sees a pale, translucent light that seems to regard him in a distinctly godlike way. Barrett doesnt believe in visions - or in God - but he cant deny what hes seen.

At the same time, in the not-quite-gentrified Bushwick neighbourhood of Brooklyn, Tyler, Barretts older brother, a struggling musician, is trying - and failing - to write a song for Beth, his wife-to-be, who is seriously ill. Tyler is determined to write a wedding song that will be not merely a sentimental ballad, but an enduring expression of love. Barrett, haunted by the light, turns unexpectedly to religion. Tyler grows increasingly convinced that only drugs can release his creative powers. Beth tries to face mortality with as much courage as she can summon.

Cunningham follows the Meeks brothers as each turns down a different path in his search for transcendence. In subtle, lucid prose, he demonstrates a profound empathy for his conflicted characters and a singular understanding of what lies at the depth of the human soul.

Members Reviews:

Michael Cunningham: A Reader's Writer

What I love about Michael Cunningham is that he is a readerâs writer. His literary allusions are satisfyingly extended metaphors that enrich the story he is telling. That effect is most profound if you are intimately familiar with the particular writer or genre he is riffing on, but I am guessing that it embellishes the overall message of his story whether you get the allusion or not. This particular novel is decorated and layered with imagery. His novel The Hours was just about as perfect as a novel can be, while this novel is a bit more uneven, but I still found myself infatuated with a fair share of the novelâs imagery.

In The Snow Queen, the literary underpinnings are very accessible, as accessible as classic fairy tales and heroic fantasies of knights and ladies. They are the very stuff of childhood for those children who seem hardwired to appreciate drama and who spend time enhancing their reality by adding mental costumes and sets, by turning ordinary actions into medieval scenarios. These kids participate in these interactions which observers see as the mundane stuff of childhood, but which the children see as gleaming and mythical vignettes which may or may not involve princesses (queens) or knights trailing âshining capes of chain mail.â These images also give the author opportunities to dazzle us with linguistic magic.

We meet Barrett and Tyler. Barrett is our dreamer, Tyler our rock star, neither as larger-than-life as we or they would wish. They are brothers with a back story; their mom died when she was struck by lightning on a golf course, but not before making high school football star Tyler promise to always look after his younger brother Barrett, who is not as socially gifted.

These brothers are no longer young. Barrett should already have outgrown that fantasy dimension which lends his world its romantic tint.