When Autumn Leaves

by Amy S. Foster

[ladygrey]

I didn't particularly like this book for two reasons.

1 - it's really more a collection of short stories than a novel. Each chapter is about one woman and this season of her life. A few of them have some sense of completion by the end, but most of them have this change and they're just starting to get interesting and I want to see what happens next and it's over. I don't do short fiction because I want more. I want to see how it turns out and I want to know what happens next and how they handle it and how people react and the ramifications of change. Transformation is the intriguing part of story and to set it up and then abandon it wasn't any fun for me.

2 - I read this expecting it to be magical realism, but it's really not. [a:Amy S. Foster|273567|Amy S. Foster|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1247174366p2/273567.jpg] works too hard to give reason to it all in the form of pagan holidays and earth energies and I don't like that. If I'm reading a fantasy novel, then yes I want some understanding of how magic works in that world. But in magical realism it's more like tangible metaphor, where the everyday things of life, emotions and knacks for things and implications, are real and have solid manifestations - a world where the unexplainable is unquestioned. This is the every day world but women have magic and it's very prosaic and understandable magic and that's not as interesting or fun.

The characters, for the space that we see them, are well formed which is why I disliked the short fiction style so little. And the plots intersected nicely and fit under the whole of the narrative but sometimes they were a little heavy on backstory or introspection so they sometimes felt slow.

I guess it wasn't badly written, it just really wasn't my cup of tea.