In Sunlight and in Shadow

Incredibly, unbelievably, ridiculously, offensively bad.Made all the worse because of the ways it's reminiscent of [b:Winter's Tale 12967 Winter's Tale Mark Helprin https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1399135618s/12967.jpg 1965767].The protagonists are fundamentally unlikeable; their “struggles” comically unrelatable (oh, the burden of wealth! gosh it must be hard to be perfect in every single way but have a momentarily hard time achieving recognition! wow life is rough when you have a problem you could easily solve with your wealthy wife's money but refuse to accept it!); the overarching themes are anger-inducing (mainly glorification of war and incredibly sexist idealization of women); the writing is tiresome, repetitive and full of pointless tangents.The ending hinted that there was possibly a good book in here somewhere (as, for the first time, we get some insight into the effect the war had on Harry)... but it was not this one.I think from now on I will just pretend that any non-Winter's Tale Helprin books do not exist.