book reviews
book reviews
THE FALLEN SNOW
By John J. Kelley
Reviewed by Jill Wisoff on March 31, 2013:
I met John J. Kelley at a pitch conference last year in NYC. I remember him reading his excerpt and thinking, Well, this one can write. We both were grappling with how to pitch novels that fell between the cracks of traditional genres.
In The Fallen Snow, Kelley’s promising debut novel, the protagonist, Joshua, a young man from a mining family in the Shenendoah Mountain (fictional) town of Hadley, Virginia, serving in France as an infantryman during WWI, falls in love with Aiden, a superior officer and medic. Rather than follow the protocols of LGBT literature, peppering the tome with a smattering of the erotic, Kelley has written a crossover coming-of-age novel filled with adventure and romance found and then lost during wartime.
While the world experiences turmoil, Joshua embraces a sexual and spiritual awakening. When peace comes, he’s broken in body and spirit. He attempts to fit into his old life. However, Hadley’s a backwater. Safety and expediency mean hiding his true nature from family and a fiancée, but it may prove impossible to damp down his natural inclination without destroying himself. Kelley parallels Joshua’s physical crippling (a leg injury that’s left him with a limp) with his hard-as-nails father’s, Wayne’s, emotional crippling. Wayne’s denied his love of music to stubbornly follow a different path, eking a living out of a spent mine. The choice has embittered him.
Kelley interweaves Joshua’s war experiences with his present narrative that begins with his return from convalescence to his family. This ultimately works, though a reader’s eye may tire from the back and forth style choice (the war chapters are italicized). As well, condensing of lines to reduce wordiness in some sections, more attention in description of dress and other such little details to time period would have been welcome, and perhaps avoiding a passage of the sexual consummation between the men may leave a reader less sensitive to Joshua’s depth of loss.
However, there’s an attractive poignancy and a compassionate eye for the characters in Kelley’s writing, and an authenticity no doubt colored by his experiences serving as a military officer. Ultimately, the focus on Joshua’s self-discovery, the dynamics within his family, the emotions of combat, the forests of the Shenendoah Mountain and the sparkle of Paris swirl together to create a universal story that delivers its message that love can never take root inside the head, but in the heart.
The Fallen Snow
by john j. kelley