Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin, a book review by Kendyl Bryant of The Adaptation Podcast

After I finished all 750 pages (or more accurately the 27-hour audiobook) of Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin, I had some very mixed emotions. Accomplishment was certainly one, exhaustion another, but I’d be lying if I said the strongest wasn’t confusion. Winter’s Tale isn’t just long; it’s also complicated with at least ten main characters, lengthy descriptions and some fairly advanced symbolism.

But all this doesn’t mean it’s not worth the time and thought that it takes to read it. It just means that the reader should be willing to expend some energy in their trek through this marsh of literary fiction and magical realism.

The story begins in the early 1900s in a New York City that is slightly more fantastical than our own and spans to the turn of the millennium. During that…