A Winterwood Winterland

I love winter! I'm like the child that would've been produced if Martha Stewart and Buddy The Elf had a baby. I know it's a weird thought. I love decorating and baking, however with COVID going on this year, I have been feeling pretty down. My anxiety and depression has consistently been at an all time high. Even my children tore down my Christmas tree a total of 6 times. It was as if the universe was deliberately trying to prevent me from having that holiday cheer!

So with the lack of snow and Christmas décor, I took to my book shelf in search of the right book to get me into the wintery mood. WINTERWOOD literally has the name WINTER on it, so I figured it was the best place to start. The author Shea Ernshaw is also the author of The Wicked Deep and her writing style almost comes off as poetic. The book on Good Reads (which yes is where I go to see previous reviews so I can get a sense of what I am about to read) is rated 3.81 stars out of 5. So not bad at all. Considering her other novel is about the same rating.

First off I have to acknowledge before I get into the review of this book, how much praise OwlCrate deserves for this cover change. I haven't seriously loved all the cover changes in the past they have done with their other novels. However this one they made white with blue accents, and blue sprayed edges! This is definitely throwing all those winter vibes at me, considering the book literally has anything and everything to do with the worst snowy season!

I am not going to totally spoil the entire book for you, but I will give away certain aspects of the book to give my honest opinion. I didn't necessarily love this book, but I definitely thought it was well written. Shea brings us the tale of a girl who is named Nora Walker.

Rumored to be a witch, only Nora Walker knows the truth. She and the Walker women before her have always shared a special connection with the woods. And it's this special connection that leads Nora to Oliver Huntsman, the same boy who disappeared from the camp for wayward boys weeks ago- and in the middle of the worst snowstorm in years. He should be dead, but here he is, alive and left in the woods with no memory of the time he'd been missing.

But Nora can feel an uneasy shift in the woods at Oliver's presence. And it's not too much longer after that, that Nora realizes she has no choice but to unearth the truth behind how the boy she has come to care so deeply about survived his time in the forest and what led him there in the first place. What Nora doesn't know, though is that Oliver has secrets of his own- secrets he'll do anything to keep buried, because as it turns out, he wasn't the only one who went missing on that fateful night all those weeks ago.

A lot of this book revolved around Nora being completely alone. Her mother seems like in the book she resents her daughter, so she will leave her unsupervised for weeks at a time. There seems to be this trend of guilt, and that she hates the legacy of the family name being attached to her at all. The author touches a lot on the grandmother who passes away in the book and that really resonated with me. She goes into details of how she wanted to keep these family traditions alive, and very much was comfortable at the core of who she was as a person. So I appreciated the author going into depth with this aspect, because my grandmother was very similar to Nora's and she passed away almost 5 years ago now. With Nora's mom being non existent in her life and growing up very independent as a child I could relate to the main character.

I loved how poetic she created the environment of where the story took place. She made it a point to really be descriptive of bringing the woods to have their own life and personality with emotions and feelings. I did feel like there was a balance of that, however I felt like she spent a lot of time building up the woods in the book than rather focusing more on the main characters and building a back story. It was there, but I felt like I was craving more details on the characters of who our story was about. Like the woods seemed to take up more 60% of the book, and the characters were the other 40%.

I also wasn't surprised. I felt like the book when I was reading it, I could call it out about 30% of the way through, of how the ending was going to go. The mom in me was insanely bothered about the lack of adults in this book. It seemed like all the kids were on their own the entire time, and not once did she mention adults ever entering the scene unless it was a flash back about her grandmother. I get these are high school kids, and maybe I was being picky, but that was just my thought process.

You can tell the author was highly influenced to write this book based off a lake that is near her home. She mentioned this in a live stream that OwlCrate did with her back in December of 2019. So the descriptiveness of the woods as a whole seems to be very accurate based off of the real life experiences she has in Oregon every winter.

I also loved that the author included inserts from inside the spell book that has been passed down in her family. It talked about the different Walkers and what their specialties were as witches. It's so their stories wouldn't be forgotten, and spells that they have created that have helped them in their journey on becoming a witch. Each has a power specific to them, and more importantly some can see the dead.

Overall I gave this book 3.5 stars. I felt like it was a solid book, don't get me wrong. I just felt like it was missing that WOW factor that would knock my socks off. But literary wise, it seems like this would be a classic book to put you in that winter mood, and I enjoyed reading it!

For more information on Shea and her upcoming announcements on future works, you can check out the link below.

And THANK YOU, for reading this review. This is just an honest opinion of the book. I was not given this book in exchange for a review. However I am open as of now to receive ARC (advanced reader copies) in exchanges for reviews here and as well as on my other social media platforms. For information feel free to email me at [email protected]. If you liked this review and want to see more content like this in the future, please consider leaving a tip below. I would totally appreciate it!

-Kayla