What is the author's style in the novel, Winter Garden?

Most significant about the language used in this novel is the language of the fairy tale. The fairy tale that Anya tells her daughters is set “in a magical realm called the Snow Kingdom” (7). Typical of the fairy tale is the reference to magic. Anya’s magical realm is called the Snow Kingdom. This name is significant because the reference to snow and the whiteness of snow indicates that the kingdom is good or innocent. As the fairy tale moves along Anya describes “evil” (7) that “rolls across the cobblestone streets in black carriages sent by a dark, evil knight who wants to destroy it all” (7). The evil in the fairy tale is delineated in terms of darkness. The carriages that carry people away are black. The evil knight is called the dark knight.

Meredith and Nina have an epiphany when they realize that their mother’s fairy tale is an allegorical way to tell the story of her own life. Nina is the first one who realizes that her mother’s story is changing and she is using real place names instead of the fictitious ones she previously used. For instance, Anya had referred to an enchanted bridge where the peasant and the prince met. When Anya tells the story again, she calls it the Fontanka Bridge, a real bridge in Russia. As the sisters continue to put together the story Nina realizes: “The Black Knight is Stalin … It’s a story within a story” (226). What Nina means is that the story is an allegory, like Gulliver’s Travels, a political allegory, or Pilgrim’s Progress, a religious allegory. In these allegories, the story is told using terms that are easy for the reader to comprehend, but stand for something larger and more complex. Nina recognizes that the character they have always heard referred to as the Black Knight, is Joseph Stalin, the leader of communist Russia. The black carriages carrying people away represent the great purge in Russia where those who were deemed disloyal were arrested, imprisoned, and usually killed.