Book Review: A Winter in New York
Here’s my review of A Winter in New York by Josie Silver. Don’t forget to leave a comment if you’ve read it or plan to read it, or if you have any other book recommendations to share.
A Winter in New York by Josie Silver is an ultra-slow-burn romance novel for those who believe in love at first sight, serendipitous connections, found family, and starting over. And I do believe many readers out there will enjoy it, as it does include those beloved genre tropes, even if it wasn’t really my cup of tea in the end. So, please take my review with a grain of salt, especially if you are an avid romance reader looking for a lighter read to zip through this season.
First, I was never able to get attached to the main character, Iris. As someone who has lost her mother myself, at a younger age than Iris, I never truly felt Iris’s loss. Not once. Iris said the same generic things about her mother and who she was over and over again, but I never truly felt Iris’s pain or complex feelings about her mother and their history. Perhaps Iris having first-person vivid flashbacks with her mother would have been more helpful in conveying such feelings, as well as the unique nature of their connection, rather than the few random third-person accounts from Vivien’s timeline dispersed throughout the book?
I was also never able to truly connect with what Iris went through with Adam in the past and how it was supposedly awful enough to force her to move to an entirely different country on the other side of the world all alone during the holiday season. Again, we’re repeatedly told how Adam is a bad guy who said mean things, but are never really shown vivid examples of what he did to Iris in the past, which prevented me from feeling deeper empathy for her. While I assume this book is meant to be a lighter romance read, this lack of detail made me stay detached from Iris.
Another thing that prevented me from truly connecting to Iris, or the novel, was Iris’s decision not to tell Gio about her relationship history or her mother’s connection to his family’s gelateria in the beginning. She says one comment in a heated moment in a bookstore (which, sadly, no one in the novel visits again) before they ever even know each other, and this is enough for her to continue to lie to him? I just couldn’t get behind this premise, or all the other reasons she refuses to give Gio and his family their highly coveted recipe back, especially as she watches them struggle to keep their business afloat. Again, this probably won’t bother many veteran romance readers, but I just couldn’t get past it. That, or how they only had one viable gelato recipe. Or how Santo supposedly couldn’t remember anything, except for his one or two encounters with Vivien decades prior…
I should also mention that I found the first half of the novel to be too slow-burn for my taste. There was a lot of repetition, and a ton of exposition that wasn’t needed, in my opinion. And it wasn’t until I reached the halfway point that I was able to get interested in the story about Gio and Iris at all, as nothing all that interesting happens before this point, least of all between them.
I did enjoy the portions of the book where Gio and Iris were connecting. They were sweet, and I wish there would have been more banter between them throughout the book. But I also wish there were more scenes about Iris wanting to follow her own passions as a chef, instead of spending all her time stressing out about the gelateria and Gio. It’s hard to root for a main character who has no real sense of self.
Ultimately, because there were heavier topics introduced and repeatedly mentioned throughout this book, I wish they would have been explored on much deeper levels or omitted altogether. Personally, I found it difficult to believe in the magic of love and fluffy romance tropes as such heavy things— like the loss of a parent, the loss of a spouse, a struggling family business, a sick family member, and domestic abuse— were lingering in the background yet never fully and explicitly explored. Either explore the harder more emotional topics in graphic detail, or don’t include them at all.
As I was reading this novel, it felt like I was reading a rom-com that wanted to be a more serious epic love story or an epic love story that wanted to be a more light-hearted rom-com, that unfortunately never fully committed to either.
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