TEEN: Midwinterblood - Marcus Sedgwick

Release Date: 06/10/11

BOOK BLURB:

Have you ever had the feeling that you've lived another life? Been somewhere that has felt totally familiar, even though you've never been there before, or felt that you know someone well, even though you are meeting them for the first time? It happens. In 2073 on the remote and secretive island of Blessed, where rumour has it that no one ages and no children are born, a visiting journalist, Eric Seven, and a young local woman known as Merle are ritually slain. Their deaths echo a moment ten centuries before, when, in the dark of the moon, a king was slain, tragically torn from his queen. Their souls search to be reunited, and as mother and son, artist and child, forbidden lovers, victims of a vampire they come close to finding what they've lost. In a novel comprising seven parts, each influenced by a moon - the flower moon, the harvest moon, the hunter's moon, the blood moon - this is the story of Eric and Merle whose souls have been searching for each other since their untimely parting. Beautifully imagined, intricately and cleverly structured, this is a heart-wrenching and breathtaking love story with the hallmark Sedgwick gothic touches of atmosphere, blood-spilling and sacrifice.


REVIEW:

This is a quirky story and one that Marcus Segwick does well as he takes the reader on a journey of discovery through the principle characters past lives as well as giving the reader the chance to observe the almost Shakespearian tragedy of them throughout. It’s experimental, it has Segwick’s fingerprints all over it and it has some interesting twists but to be honest it wasn’t a title that kept me enthralled as it felt a little flat and more a series of short stories with an interlinking thread throughout rather than a fully planned or realised novel by the final page.

Don’t get me wrong, it does do what it promises and gives you something different, but for me, its not a title that’s going to stay with me for very long and I feel that others have tackled this sort of thing before with greater success. Still something for Marcus’ fans but for the majority of readers, not the authors best piece of work to date.