The Snow Garden

The ending did not fit the story arc and was disappointing.

I thought about giving this two stars before I explained it to my roommate. Then we both realized: One star.

House of Wax. Major trauma. Badly developed mystery. Stupid characters. Everyone is gay or traumatized or both. Fine, whatever. In real life, that can happen, sure. But in your insular little book? It's like yaoi. In yaoi, everyone is pretty much gay.
And, to boot, EVERYONE is traumatized or idiotic? Plot elements make no freakin' sense. They are introduced in the beginning and then left dangling so the author can indulge in ridiculous melodrama–character development, my arse–and bring it haplessly together in the end. It's not bad enough to have a wife murder and machinations of revenge by a ‘roided-out architect, but a sex cult on TOP of all that? No, no, no.

It is totally yaoi meets House of Wax meets J.T. Leroy. I barely made it through this one. We. Are. So. Done.

Plus, if you read the back, it sounds potentially like ‘The Shining' for college students. Nope. The back has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the book. It is TOTALLY misleading.

OH, yeah. I really only liked Randall at all. Jesse and Tim have their characters basically assassinated throughout the book, and they could have been all right. Kathryn is just a bitch the entire time. Yawn, kiddies.