Written in startling vignettes...Tina May Hall’s debut novel, The Snow Collectors, draws upon the depressed and desolate. Set in a snowpocalypse, Hall takes readers deep into the icy reaches of both past and future ... the short snippets propel the plot and almost taunt the reader ... The prose is lyrical but measured, evocative but never florid. Hall wields a frank briskness in her words, but not an impatience. Readers see clearly what they need to see, and by that token, they do not see what they do not need to see. So often a mystery disappoints by revealing too much or too little, which is not the case in Hall’s novel. The Snow Collectors is a surprising blend of genres. Mystery, of course, but of a definitive literary bent. The aforementioned traditional Gothic elements are also woven throughout, but with heavy intent, and Hall’s exploration of grief speaks authentically to its particular expressions and emanations ... Given Hall’s innovative style—its spare, quick pacing coupled with its punchy, exacting prose—readers can easily devour both [the book] over a weekend.
... intoxicating ... the text has heirloom sensibilities. Henna narrates, her purling phrases functioning like dirge, memorializing words as they fade into silence and passion as it buzzes to its peaks. Her fascination with nineteenth-century snow collectors complements her own preoccupation with resisting impermanence and restraints. The evocative secondary cast [members]...each contribute to the book’s dreamy Gothic atmosphere, which is redolent of candlelight and incense, marked by damask decorations and houses ablaze against the snow. Its brutality tempered by its lovely phraseology, The Snow Collectors is an unusual mystery whose quirks are worth giving in to.
Ms. Hall is my favorite kind of writer, a born poet who turns to prose and imbues that rather proletarian form with the grace and lightness of verse ... But the mishmash of The Snow Collectors defeated me. Grafted onto Henna’s psychological drama are acts of sudden violence that could come, as Henna puts it, from 'some cut-rate thriller.' Added to all that is a bizarre gothic romance involving the village police chief, whose ancestors were connected with the Franklin expedition. The story wobbles between these genres like the needle on a broken compass. It doesn’t lead you into mystery so much as simply get you lost.
Hall has written a lovely, lush, surrealist book set in a cold, snowy village in a world where environmental collapse is beginning ... The book is atmospheric, compelling, and beautiful, infused with gentle, earthy fantasy and a soft push into the future, drawing deeply on the gothic genre. Hall’s book is poetic and ghostly, haunting the reader with its intriguing story and its evocative imagery of ice.
Tina May Hall is not shy about presenting her novel as a murder mystery from its first sentence ... simultaneously plot driven and softened by its atmospheric prose ... I don’t think I will be alone in saying it is not the novel I expected Tina May Hall to write. I almost certainly will not be alone in saying I am grateful she wrote it all the same ... the writing reads as nearly gleeful ... is lush and clever with its prose, but Tina May Hall writes with the confidence of a prosaist who knows her novel is damn fun. There are stylistic embellishments which could put our most prominent poets to shame and there are times when the novel seems unceasing in its most base narrative pleasures ... In the midst of all this pleasure though, one could almost lose sight of how serious this novel is. Set in an arctic landscape on the verge of environmental catastrophe, Hall is ultimately writing a book about extinction ... Hall wades in and out of genre trappings with nerve and with playfulness.
Hall seamlessly weaves dreamlike imagery with descriptions of police procedure and scientific inquiry as Henna works to confirm her intuition that the murder’s connection to the past is real and not imagined. This elegant account of a woman’s confrontation with a cover-up delivers historical intrigue and emotional depth.
The story is captivating and well paced apart from the heavy-handed reportage of Rembrandt's activities and an unremarkable ending. An inventive premise, lush imagery, and a shameful historical secret nicely elevate an otherwise formulaic cabin-in-the-woods story.
