this book is interesting because i think it may unfold for me over time. it's a quiet and interior novel about mostly about nothing really, just a mother and daughter moving and musing through the world. i don't think it quite hit the mark for me, i feel as though even though there were moments of well-evoked atmosphere, the setting was not nearly as strong as I anticipated and though there is some good description of nature, the passage of the protagonist didn't impress on me any strong consequence of that natural environment. i think there were some interesting ideas, but in typical debut style, they were all squeezed in haphazard (which I understand, if you only get one chance you may as well put in every insightful thought you've ever had). i think that the novel was alright, and indicated that jessica au could one day write something that I fall head over heels over, but not today !

Jessica Au's award winning novella is a dense and ambiguous focus on family, memories, and a mother, born in rural China, raised in Hong Kong, and leaving for an unknown country (since Au is Chinese-Australian, it seems logical to assume that it is Australia) where she raises two daughters who attend Catholic school. A daughter invites her reluctant mother, from whom she has been distant for some considerable time, on a trip to Japan. They meet in Tokyo, going on to Osaka and Kyoto, removing their footwear and putting on slippers to see museum exhibitions, of pots and vases, fabrics and visiting galleries, with reflections on art in a richly detailed narrative. However, how far can we trust the daughter's account? Her mother barely speaks, a ghostly presence, is she even there? There is a reference later on about clearing out her mother's home later on.

Interspersed in the story are non-linear memories, of family in Hong Kong, an Uncle with heart problems, working as a waitress in a restaurant, and her medic sister, who when young had a raging temper, and has 2 children. We are given a glimpse of just how much her world opened up at college, her idolisation of a lecturer and appreciation of other students, her first encounter with Greek literature, the myths and legends, house sitting, and parties. She has recently moved apartment with her partner, Laurie, his father a sculptor, the two of them having conversations as to whether they should have children. In Japan, we see the mother and daughter seeking to connect, a vast cultural, philosophical and beliefs abyss between them. This is a common experience within immigrant families, the daughter admitting she has never given much thought as to what it must have been like for her mother to move and live in Australia.

This is a story of art, family, being an immigrant, and identity, of unreliable memories, with the mirroring of 'pentimento', the changing of the past to makes things appear not as they were, but more of how we wish them to be. The beautiful, precise prose atmospherically echoes the remoteness, cold and distance that marks much of the relationship between mother and daughter. This is a fascinatingly unsettling read, where you can never be sure of what is real and what is not, and for me the writing was the highlight. I have to say personally I would prefer to have a more emotional connection with the characters in a book, but would nevertheless recommend this novella to other readers . Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

Cold Enough for Snow was a quiet, spellbinding journey. It followed a woman and her mother’s travels around a rainy Japan, where they visit art galleries and installations, restaurants and gift shops. All the while, they talk — but no speech is ever quoted. Instead, our protagonist relates it to us second-hand, paraphrases, keeps us as distanced from her mother as she herself seems to be. Other people in this little novel have, as a result, a sense of otherness about them, of unknowability, of mystery, while meanwhile we delve only further and further into the complex inner life of the main character.

Past memories slowly begin to interrupt the present day events, until more often than not we find ourselves in the past, attending lectures and parties, house-sitting and waitressing, swimming and going for dinner. Slowly a theme emerges. In each memory, as in the present, the character is looking for something, searching for an almost preternatural enlightenment. Always, she seems to be excluded from knowledge, whether by wealth and access, or by language and her own inability to formulate the question.

This book does the magic thing of putting into words experiences you’ve never thought to describe, or perhaps never thought others shared. The depth and lucidity of the insights is startling, breathtaking. The language is pared back, but elegant. And yet, still, the story has the quality and tone of a dream, is magical and beautiful, mystifying and elusive, all at once.

Overall, the feeling of this book is one of loneliness. What does anyone look like? We never know. The present-day narrative takes place in Japan, but the narrator’s flashbacks are rarely situated in time or space. Where are we in the world? How old is she here? What actually happened, and what didn’t? What here is real? We don’t know. We don’t know. The whole narrative seems to be reaching for some kind of understanding, “some deeper truth, or horror” but can never quite make it there, just as the protagonist herself cannot. By the end of the story, we at last have the question, or a sense of it. But answers, as always, elude.

Thank you for the opportunity to read 'Cold Enough for Snow'.

This is an unusual book. There are beautifully observed scenes and I could imagine the relationship between mother and daughter but I couldn't quite understand the point of the book. I felt rather dissatisfied by the end of the book and came away with a sense of needing more.

Cold Enough For Snow is a woman’s drab and self-obsessed monologue about everything and nothing. The narrator and her mother meet up in Tokyo to travel together, and interspersed between mundane descriptions of the trip are disjointed thoughts about the narrator’s encounter with Classical literature and art, childhood memories of her uncle, interactions with her sister and her partner, and underdeveloped reflections on (perhaps) her identity. The mother figure is there without actually being there, never showing the tiniest mote of personality through action or speech. The blurb doesn’t say much about the book but cleverly asks some interesting questions, but I am none the wiser after having read the whole text because, well, the author doesn’t address any of them. It has no plot, no thematic focus, no meaningful characterisation, and left no impression whatsoever on me.

This was definitely not what i expected and i figure thats why it might have lowered my rating. I am a character-driven reader that likes to connect or understand the characters but the way this was written was more plot-forward than anything due to its journal format.

This was written as an emotionally-disconnected character looking from the outside in. I thought that the relationship between mother and daughter would convey an obvious openness but instead the writing took me away from any investment.

"As we walked, she asked me about my work. I didn’t answer at first, and then I said that in many of the old paintings, one could discover what was called a pentimento, an earlier layer of something that the artist had chosen to paint over. Sometimes, these were as small as an object, or a colour that had been changed, but other times, they could be as significant as a whole figure, an animal, or a piece of furniture. I said that in this way too, writing was just like painting. It was only in this way that one could go back and change the past, to make things not as they were, but as we wished they had been, or rather as we saw it. I said, for this reason, it was better for her not to trust anything she read."

Cold Enough for Snow may be short, but for the few pages that it has, it packs a mighty punch. The story centres around the protagonist and her mother who have met to take a trip together in Tokyo. It's not easy to say what this story is about as such, because yes they take a trip through museums, galleries, restaurants, parks and cafés, but behind the simplicity of the story, there's a depth to this story that speaks of relationships, time, art, pain and beauty.

The story moves between physical locations, the protagonist and her mother communicating in a way that feels as though they don't know each other as well as they would like to, but the important thing is that they are trying. It's difficult to tell if either of the main characters enjoy being there and being together, or whether they're there because they feel as though they should be.

The story is interspersed with memories, with dreams, with half forgotten truths. I think that this is where the magic lies in this beautiful story. The protagonist voices so many of her thoughts that seem strange or even sometimes unsettling, and yet, I found myself realising that often I felt the same. Maybe we can all relate to this humble humanity in feeling strange and out of place, as if we're constantly walking into a room just after everybody else has left.

There is a story told within this book of the protagonist's uncle. It's about birds, beauty and forbidden love and I know that it will sit within me for a long time to come.

I can't say that this is a joyful book, nor can I say that it's a particularly sad one. It's wistful, lonely and nostalgic - it's about memory and how this can and does shape who and what we are as we move through our lives.

A beautifully profound little book. Recommended especially to those who enjoy Japanese literature.

This was definitely a read outside my comfort zone. Written in a stream-of-consciousness style, we follow our protagonist through her memories, her predictions for the future, and her musings on family, philosophy, the meaning of life, and her relationship with her mother while they are on holiday together in Tokyo. Her thoughts sometimes come with musings on the nature of existence, and sometimes peter out and drift away. It’s very slice-of-life, and is full of highly cinematic moments.

I enjoyed this book, overall, but it was a little too drifting and directionless to be something I would read again.

Cold Enough for Snow is a lyrical meditation on adulthood and relationships, both to loved ones and oneself. The story follows a daughter and her mother on a short trip to autumnal Japan, concentrating mostly on the relationship between the two women and brief impressions of the place. While Au touches on many topics such as art, growing up, and the pressure to perform, for me, this was ultimately a story about the impossibility to understand our parents as beings who once had a life not involving their children.
Told from the daughter's point of view, the first-person narrative with a complete lack of direct dialogue seems to capture the imperfection of communication and struggle for understanding. While the daughter tries her best to get to know her mother better, she inadvertently fails to see her as a complete human being in itself, always relating her to herself.
While the writing was lyrical and well-crafted, I felt like it lacked a substance. While enjoyable when reading, I am left with little memorable moments just a couple of days after reading. If writing was like a painting, and novels were like pictures, this book would surely be an impressionist painting. Lovely to look at, skillfully made, and evocative, but essentially blurry and not particularly interesting.

‘I had one vague, exhausted thought that perhaps it was all right not to understand all things, but simply to see and hold them.’

4.5✨— written in quietly beautiful prose, ‘cold enough for snow’ is an expansively drawn novella mediating on the delicate bonds between an unnamed mother and daughter, as they embark on a vacation together across japan.

for such a short length of work, i was surprised to find just how immersive jessica au’s writing is. told from the perspective of the daughter, much of the novella takes on an enigmatic quality, as sparse indirect dialogue with her mother gives way to the interior thoughts of our narrator. mostly, she picks apart fragments of memories and stories she holds about her family members, peeling back layer after layer of childhood memories to discover new meanings, and frequently reflects on the cultural and emotional distance felt between her mother (who immigrated from hong kong) and herself/her sister (who were raised in an unnamed, presumably western country).

books that explore the character of places are my most favourite to read, and ‘cold enough for snow’ being written like a travelogue of japanese cities made it all the more an enjoyable book for me. through the observant tone of our narrator, each page offers mesmerising details of the museums, art galleries, tea houses, temples, hidden alleyways, mountain trails and café’s visited by our character’s in japan during the autumn season. ultimately, i consider the book to be a beautiful reflection and appreciation of mother-daughter bonds, travel, art, history, and family heritage.

many thanks to fitzcarraldo editions for my netgalley e-arc, this was such a pleasure to read <3

Reading Cold Enough for Snow was like reading a book I've always wanted to read, but didn't know it was possible to write. Everything about it is exquisite, from the writing, to the ideas, to the atmosphere that creeps into you from the very first lines, that I found myself wondering how anyone could ever be capable of such magic in so little space?

To speak of plot with Cold Enough for Snow would be to miss the point: this seems to me a book about the preciousness of life first and foremost, about the magic that can sometimes imbue the simplest acts and reminds you that this life is worth living. It is also about the precariousness of such beauty, its fleeting nature, but its vibrant existence nonetheless. The sun rays hitting the cold blue waters of a pool, the clouds on a sunny day as you are walking home, the otherwordliness of a crater-lake, the softness of tying your mother's shoes.

In it, it reminded me both of Virginia Woolf and Marilynne Robinson, two masters of the power of the unassuming. In fact, there is this moment in Cold Enough for Snow when the narrator goes on a hike and remembers a visit to a dark lake that is eerily reminiscent of Housekeeping in the best way. Likewise, the conversation between the narrator and her mother had an Anne Carson quality to it, especially in "The Glass Essay," where you can feel the unspoken at the edge of what little is spoken.

Cold Enough for Snow is about this and so much more. There are moments of insight into writing and memory that make you question your own reading of this compact story, as you wonder if perhaps you have been somehow fooled, if this is perhaps a story about ghosts after all. It is unsettling and beautiful in a way that invites re-reading it the moment you've turned the last page.

*2.5

Although "Cold Enough for Snow" is less than 105 pages, I struggled to complete this novella. I was looking forward to this publication and had high hopes based on the premise. Unfortunately, I felt underwhelmed by the time I’d finished reading it.

I thought that this book was going to focus on a mother/daughter relationship and their reunification through dialogue as the description of the book notes:

“A mother and daughter travel from abroad to meet in Tokyo: they walk along the canals through the autumn evenings, escape the typhoon rains, share meals in small cafes and restaurants, and visit galleries to see some of the city’s most radical modern art. All the while, they talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes, and objects, about family, distance, and memory.”

Yet, during most of the story, they barely talk at all. In fact, for almost two thirds of the story, the reader doesn’t get any deep or meaningful conversation between the two characters. For over half of the book—unless we’re privy to a flashback—Au lists the things that the two characters do or describes the setting. Normally, I enjoy descriptive writing. However, while reading descriptive content in Cold Enough for Snow, I was confused because it was riddled with grammatical errors, punctuation errors and issues with diction which left me rereading sentences over and over again until I became so frustrated that I moved past them after I couldn’t understand what had been written.

I finished reading this book a few days ago and thought I’d allow myself some time to reflect about the experience and the content. I especially hoped that the extra time would help me understand the content more. I’m sorry to report that it hasn’t. In fact, as I’ve reflected on the description of the book, I’m more confused about what is being reckoned (as is mentioned in the description) and how this novella is an elegy (as it is described).

Now, what I’m left with is more than a few unanswered questions that make me feel as if I either didn’t understand the story (very possible) or got lost along the way (also very possible). For example, what was (were) the purpose(s) of the flashbacks and how did they correlate to the current timeline? Did Au incorporate the flashbacks at specific points in the present timeline for a reason? If so why? Why is two-thirds of the narrative focused on the plot of the mother and daughter’s trip to Japan and then in the last third heavily focused on flashbacks of the protagonist, her education, job, swimming, and partner? I don’t know what it is that I’m missing because I have reread parts of the story and thought through the narrative and still come up drawing a blank, similar to how the protagonist feels when she’s explaining her inability to ask the right questions about Laure’s father’s sculpture of the face, or as the protagonist says, “I had one vague, exhausted thought that perhaps it was all right not to understand all things, but simply to see and hold them” LOC 988-996. However, I don’t want to hold onto the things that I read as I don’t feel there was satisfactory character development and/or relationship development (or disintegration) between the mother and daughter.
Although I didn’t enjoy this title as much as I’d hoped, I’m in the minority and hope that you’ll pick up this title and decide for yourself.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Fitzcarraldo Editions for allowing me to read an ARC of "Cold Enough for Snow" in exchange for an honest review!

A beautiful little book. I felt like I entered some sort of dreamlike state whilst reading it. The author definitely knows how to arrest the reader’s attention without resorting to cheap tricks, she does it purely with the power of her words. I left the book with a lot of think about; family, nature, travel and the human spirit. A wonderful piece of writing that I cannot wait to recommend to others.

3.5 stars, rounded down. A slight novella about the gaping silences and unspoken voids in the relationship between an adult daughter and her elderly mother, separated by cultural and linguistic divides that they don't have the necessary emotional openness to cross, epitomized by the lack of direct dialogue between them. The journal-form narrative follows the narrator (a writer ostensibly raised in Australia) and her mother (an immigrant from Hong Kong) on a weeklong trip from Tokyo to Kyoto, interspersed with flashbacks to the pasts of various members of their family. Au's prose is evocative, creating a smooth and burnished surface, but there doesn't seem to be much psychological depth there, beyond the growing realization that the narrator might be entirely unreliable. What rankled me the most was Au's lingering upon some of the most obvious aspects of Japanese culture-- wabi-sabi porcelain, high-concept fashion, minimalist food, autumn leaves-- which frequently veered into Orientalist clichés for a Western audience.

The effects of this novella are still sinking in.

Though the narrator entirely transports you to Japan, her student days, her life with her partner, you feel as if she is talking directly to you. There is a poignant kind of calm to her narrative style, and so much is said in the words that aren’t spoken. Though on the surface the story is about a bonding trip between mother and daughter, there is an undercurrent of thoughts that keep bubbling to the surface as the daughter reflects on her mother’s experience as a Chinese immigrant in Australia, and how her experiences and choices ultimately affected her children.

The novella reads like an autobiography rather than a piece of fiction, in its clarity and gentle voice.

I have a lot of respect for Fitzcarraldo as a publisher, and I was thrilled when I saw this volume on here! Thank you so much to Fitzcarraldo and NetGalley for this absolute privilege.

I've never read a Fitzcarraldo Editions book that I didn't love, and this is no exception.

It hits a lot of sweet spots for me: beautiful writing, a very simple narrative, a sort of melancholia drifting over everything.

There's an uncertainty about what is really happening, which is eerily at odds with the meticulous transcription of minor details. I have a soft spot for being told about things like red woollen socks, and smalls bowls of rice, and thick notepaper. The pliability of memory is somehow set against this faithful rendering of actual things, and the novel is both immediate and remote.

I think it is about art and grief and language and memory and, most of all, intimacy. It's quite painful to read, for such a quiet book, and it is the perfect length for that.

My thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions and NetGalley for the ARC.

I thought Cold Enough for Snow rather wonderful. I liked its elegiac mood, its introspectiveness, and its restraint. The narrator of the novella is in Japan with her mother, visiting temples, galleries, eateries and walking the streets of Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto. Beautifully observed, it all seems quite simple but as the narrator reminisces about her and her family’s past, deeper themes and ambiguities begin to surface. This is a story about immigration and deep feelings of dislocation it causes, search for belonging through culture, food and art. It’s an immersive, almost hypnotic read that left me (also an immigrant) in a reflective mood. I imagine subsequent readings being equally if not even more rewarding. Highly recommended.

My thanks to Fitzcarraldo Press and Netgalley for the opportunity to read Cold Enough for Snow.

Mother and daughter embark on a short holiday in Japan. Beautifully written, it is easy to see why this is an award winning novella.
I got the feeling like I was reading the journal of the unnamed daughter but not in a invasive way. Her thought patterns felt jolty but really familiar, I felt I knew her every memory, or was her, but also knew nothing about her. The book doesn't really have any dialogue, however it didn't feel like it was missing.

This writing style is new to me, I am not sure if I absolutely love it, or the opposite, but I didnt want to stop reading it. It really captured a gentle moment of the connection and disconnection between mother and daughter.

A woman and her mother, Chinese by heritage and Australian by nationality, travel to Japan to visit museums, enjoy the beauty of autumn, possibly re-connect. Beautiful, enigmatic, inconclusive the book is told from the unnamed daughter's POV. The visit engenders memories of their life, their history, what she has been told of her family in Hong Kong and whether it is true or not. Deceptively slender, this book may carry elements of metafiction, and is already an award winner. Special.

The quality of Au's prose speaks for itself and this intriguingly chilly novel can be read in many different ways. An extremely interesting read with much to recommend it alongside mirror and smoke. Very much look forward to seeing what Au writes next.