Cold Snap

I wanna say this was a swing and a miss, but it felt more like watching someone who had no business being there at all walk up to bat - without a bat - and get nailed in the face with a speedball. Genuinely don't understand what message I'm supposed to walk away from this story with.

Sometimes a book flounders because it's trying to do too many things at once, and gets pulled in too many directions. Not the case here. Instead we have a singular focus on a newly-widowed mother with intense survivor guilt trying and failing to reconnect with her brooding teenage son by honoring her dead husband's wish to spend Christmas in a cabin in the woods. Which on its own sounds like a strong enough prompt to work with, but it doesn't go anywhere. She remains a high-strung and irrational victim of the same repeating flashback throughout the story and the only action she decides to take during the climax (if you could even call it that) doesn't result in any character changes. She was created to suffer and on that front I suppose she was a resounding success.

Maybe this was actually a super clever postmodern rejection of the classic three-act story format that went clean over my head, but somehow I doubt that. Despite the lack of spelling and grammatical errors this managed to feel like something less than a first draft, like a one-half draft; a concept of a story.