The Winter Room is richly descriptive.

Paulsen creates an evocative, sensory language to communicate the mood and rhythm of rural life as shaped by the seasons. The language employs several devices that accentuate sound and rhythm. In the first part, "Tuning," the incremental repetition of the phrase, "If books could be more," acts like the verse of a song or the invocation of a chant. The phrase expands in meaning and grows in intensity until it leads to a starkly simple revelation and reminder. Throughout the novel the characteristic device is a cumulative, elaborated sentence. Nouns, verbs, and adjectives multiply to give different aspects of one impression. Phrases and clauses are connected by conjunctions rather than separated by punctuation.

The effect is a sense of assembling a rich collage. No one detail is more important than the other; the whole is greater than the sum of...