"Intoxicating...the dreamy Gothic atmosphere 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."
—Foreword Reviews (starred)
"A deliciously creepy atmosphere...An inventive premise, lush imagery, and shameful historical secret."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Hall seamlessly weaves dreamlike imagery with descriptions of police procedure and scientific inquiry ... This elegant account of a woman’s confrontation with a cover-up delivers historical intrigue and emotional depth."
—Publishers Weekly
"Hall is nothing short of a conjurer and this story of intrigue is her spell. ... A befitting read on a night of troubled weather, where you're safe inside but trapped in the same labyrinth of cruelty and deception as The Snow Collectors."
—Fangoria
"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."
—Wall Street Journal
"Hall has written a lovely, lush, surrealist book...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."
—Booklist
"Hall has created a work of storytelling art...Hall pushes and pulls the readers, daring them to follow along."
—Heavy Feather Review
"The Snow Collectors is lush and clever with its prose...Tina May Hall writes with the confidence of a prosaist who knows her novel is damn fun."
—Chicago Review of Books
"The prose is lyrical but measured, evocative but never florid....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."
—The Masters Review
"Hall is a poet as well as a prose writer and this is certainly evident throughout The Snow Collectors. It’s a novel rife with turns of phrase that hit me on a visceral level."
—Untoward Mag
"If Joan Aiken had set out to write Rebecca, The Snow Collectors might have been the result. An orphaned woman discovers a body and pushes her way into a concatenation of events that at first seems to offer her love but soon curves toward her own destruction. Dark and eccentric, quirky in all the right ways, and beautifully written, this is the story of someone who, like so many of us, keeps trying to unravel a mystery well past the moment when she knows she should stop."
—Brian Evenson, author of Last Days
"Tina May Hall’s magnificent heroine Henna—an ingenious cross between Nancy Drew, a Charlotte Bronte character, and a cynical Gen-Xer—is the best thing that’s going to happen to you this year. This novel, which is a tale of love and longing, fear and grief, is also a deep meditation on snow and the power of water to both ravage and save us. I loved every page. The tiny Antarctic flash chapters and the longer, snowed-in rural Northern New York chapters twine together to produce an exquisite rope of tension. Hall’s language is crisp and fresh and wholly authentic as it pulls you through both the 19th and 21st centuries. This book shimmers like an icicle in the seeping dusk."
—Sherrie Flick, author of Thank Your Lucky Stars
“The Snow Collectors is a wonder of a book, and Tina May Hall is a wonder of a writer. In lyrical, precise prose, Hall draws us into the snow-globed labyrinth of a dead body and the ghosts of a nineteenth-century expedition within a novel that is equal parts mystery, gothic fiction, and experimental innovation. Hall’s work occupies the liminal space between poetry and prose, and this novel is an atmospheric marvel that is both ethereal and impossible to put down.”
—Anne Valente, author of Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down
"Eerie, atmospheric, and unexpected—this gorgeously written book grips hold of you from the first page and doesn’t let go."
—Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire
"At first, The Snow Collectors seems all subtle piecework, every sentence exquisite, combining icy clarity with sensual surprise. Yet in no time the novel reveals more, the stains and strains of our human messes. Altogether, it proves a miraculous amalgam: a grief narrative, a Gothic romance, a cold-case mystery, and a tale of climate catastrophe. I came away ravished."
—John Domini, author of MOVIEOLA! and The Color Inside a Melon
Praise for The Physics of Imaginary Objects
"Like miniature boxes inventively and carefully wrapped, Tina May Hall's stories open to reveal the prize inside: worlds spun from caught moments, little mysteries, and shimmery incantations. Nimbly charting a terrain between fiction and poetry, reality and another realm, this is a book of insights both delicate and keen from a singular new voice."
-Anne Sanow, author of Triple Time, winner of the 2009 Drue Heinz Literature Prize
"This enigmatic collection comprises curious musings on the convergence of the natural and human worlds. [Delivers] atmospheric and dreamlike stories sure to fascinate."
-Publishers Weekly
"[Hall] marries plot to the beauty of her prose—but her priorities are lyricism first, narrative second. She's concerned with relationships, the hidden lives of objects, and the death of beauty. She's concerned with those tiny, everyday moments that reverberate throughout our lives, a beacon of otherworldliness in an ordinary world."
-The Rumpus
"Hall's pungent writing breaks down walls between poetry and prose, narrator and reader, humor and horror. These stories, a daunting cross between Rikki Ducornet and early Jayne Anne Phillips, reveal the author's fascination with life and death, the confusion of hunger with other needs, and the bureaucratic tyranny of forms: sonnets and novellas, chapters and verses."
-Los Angeles Times
"One of the most breathtaking books you will read this year. The stories are dense and elegant and oftentimes strange but always engaging.Hall is a master sentence crafter. She put words together in really complex, beautiful ways. . . As I read each story I was left with a profound sense of awe for the intelligence and grace with which this collection was written."
-Roxane Gay, HTMLGIANT
"One of the best [collections of fiction] I've read in a very long time. Reach out into the darkness and take its hand, fall in love with the shadows, and open yourself up to the unknown."
-The Nervous Breakdown
"It looks like prose to the eye, but it's memorable for the beauty and rhythm of the language, and it longs to be read aloud. . . Some stories in the collection have a traditional structure, but their magic is still in the poetry."
-Wall Street Journal
"Occasionally you stumble across a piece of literary fiction so eloquent in its style, honest in its material, and direct in its approach that it resonates with you days, weeks, years after you read it. The Physics of Imaginary Objects is one of these intelligent, enlightening, and brazen books that you'll want to place on your shelf at eye-level so you will remember to keep picking it up. Hall's poetic style and articulate precision give this book a revolutionary quality. It nudges you along with an air of solemn importance and modest wisdom. Expertly composed and awesomely beautiful, Hall's hybrid of poetry and prose is neither sparse nor excessive, sentimental nor detached, diffident nor ostentatious."
-Newpages.com
"What Hall does is what art aims to do at its best: she elevates the ordinary or even ugly to expose the truth about people, the human struggle to love and be loved, by one's spouse, by one's offspring, all in the search of a happy ending."
-Literary Review
2019-11-10
A grieving woman researches a possible murder in this novel by Hall (The Physics of Imaginary Objects, 2010, etc.).
One year and seven months after the loss of her parents and twin sister at sea, Henna, a freelance encyclopedia writer who specializes in entries having to do with water, moves to an unnamed village where her constant companions are the oppressive snow and her sister's basset hound, Rembrandt. When Henna finds a woman's dead body under a hawthorn bush at the edge of the woods, she resolves to find out the secret meaning of the woman's death, who was responsible for it, and how it's connected to Lady Jane Franklin's search for her Arctic-explorer husband, who disappeared with his two ships in 1845. Suspects include the "rakishly handsome" police chief, Fletcher, his unusual mother, Eleanor, and their alarmingly attractive and intrusive housekeeper, Dita. Is Fletcher innocent of the woman's death, or has Henna been "blinded by a spot of canoodling"? Birds, blood, the town library's tower room, and Fletcher's strange house combine with other elements to create a deliciously creepy atmosphere. 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.
