August 23, 2003
The Snow Garden by Christopher Rice

The Snow Garden by Christopher Rice: one of the most boring books that I’ve had the displeasure of reading in quite some time.

Set at one of the most prestigious colleges in the country, the book revolves around two freshmen, their friend, and the college professor that one of them is sleeping with. Since the college professor is married, the fact that he’s sleeping with a student isn’t a good thing, especially since it’s a male student. The professor’s wife ends up dead causing all kinds of suspicion to fall on him. The college was also the scene of a young woman’s drowning twenty years earlier causing one to wonder what the parallels may be.

The Snow Garden is supposed to be this great psychological thriller and horror story, but I couldn’t ever get into it. I found all of the characters either downright unlikable or uninteresting. Also found the way that people’s past secrets were hinted about for over half the novel very annoying. By about page three hundred or so, the novel started picking up, but since the book is only four hundred pages long, that’s quite a lot of pages to have to slosh through to get to any kind of interesting material.