Book Review: Wishing For Snow

Book cover of Wishing For Snow. Photo / Supplied

Wishing For Snow by Minrose Gwin
HarperCollins $24.99

Minrose Gwin clearly had a miserable time of it. Her father, Al the airman, only stuck around long enough to witness her birth, then fled to parts unknown, never to be seen again, although, to be fair, he did send Minrose a birthday present every year.

Her mother, Erin Taylor Clayton Pitner, married again, to another pilot referred to by Minrose only as "the salesman". Not a close relationship, then.

Minrose had a happy enough childhood, with her mother and grandmother, also called Minrose, and her great-grandmother, another Erin.

While this demonstrates a startling lack of originality in the naming stakes, it also makes the book very confusing, and Gwin frequently fails to specify which Minrose or Erin she is writing about in any one passage.

But things become a little clearer as the book progresses, and Minrose the Elder dies. Erin Taylor (as she is known) goes very quietly mad, and Minrose the Younger is forced to have her mother committed to a mental institute - twice.

Distressed at this outcome, Gwin goes back through her mother's diaries, lists (some mundane, such as shopping lists, others such as words to be used in as-yet-unwritten poems).

And poems there certainly are, for Erin Taylor has some lyrical ability. Some examples, at least towards the end of the book, are quite moving:

For a friend dying
Don't speak death. Not yet.
I bring you bread, your favourite,
Rich with raisins
And regret for years displaced
Between us.

Earlier efforts tended towards the maudlin and sometimes outright banal.

Parts of Wishing For Snow are heart-rending, as Minrose clears up the rotten meat her mother hoards and discovers cupboards full of cans of green beans, her mother's sole diet for years. But there are happier times, such as when the two dig up flower bulbs together for transplanting to another garden, and share their pleasure in the treasures they find.

I have little doubt that Gwin mourns the loss of her mother into madness, and we might have been able to share it too. But the style of the book, the repetitions, and the slipshod writing have the effect of making the reader care less.

It's a pity.

Phoebe Falconer is a Herald columnist.