A Good Winter is the second novel by New Zealand author, Gigi Fenster. Lara, a fairly recent widow, is a new arrival in Olga’s city apartment block. She sold the family home to be closer to her just widowed, pregnant daughter, Sophie. Some three months after Michael’s birth, Sophie’s grief is compounded by post-natal depression: she is not coping with motherhood.

Having made a casual acquaintance over Olga’s green fingers and Lara’s pot-plant failures, Sophie’s crisis unites them: Olga’s generous offer to care for Sophie and Michael until Lara can work her job’s two-week notice is gratefully accepted. Sophie really is quite hopeless with Michael, and Olga’s competence and efficiency is sorely needed. Sophie is, frankly, a bit of a wallower: she likes being depressed.

But even when Lara is freely available to attend to Sophie’s every demand, Olga is still filling a desperate need: Lara is so stressed and overworked, she needs Olga to care for her, and to vet the stream of inconsiderate visitors who claim to be Sophie’s closest friends, coming around for trivial purposes when Michael should be sleeping and Sophie should be resting. That, at least, is what Olga repeatedly tells herself.

This clear need doesn’t end when Sophie believes her depression is lifting: anyone can see she’s just one tiny incident away from a relapse. Nor does she have a clue about what is good for Michael, or the pressure she’s putting on Lara. Olga has to keep stepping in, for everyone’s good…

From Olga’s first-person narrative, the reader is immediately aware that she is unhinged: her heroine complex, her sense of entitlement, and especially her stalking behaviour, all build a sense of foreboding.

Olga builds a story around perceived slights, reads unintended meaning into casual remarks and deeds, and manipulates the facts, both past and present, to reassure herself. She brims with unvoiced criticism of Sophie, her friends and Lara’s friends while, fixated as she is on Lara, any doubts about Lara’s behaviour that arise she quickly and neatly rationalises away. Until, finally, she doesn’t.

Sporadic, selective glimpses of her childhood and early adult life, as shared with Lara, give the reader only a vague idea of why she is so mentally deranged. That Olga is an unreliable narrator is quickly apparent, so the reader may begin to draw conclusions about her real relationship with her mother, at which we are left guessing. More of a resolution would have been appreciated.

As Olga seems to increasingly lose touch with reality, the story builds to an apparent climax before a shock twist. Sadly, this excellent psychological thriller loses half a star for that irritating editorial affliction of omitting quote marks for speech.
This unbiased review is from a copy provided by Text Publishing