Title Winterwood Series --- Author Shea Ernshaw Cover Art --- Publisher Simon Pulse - 2019 First Printing Simon Pulse - 2019 Category Young Adult Warnings None Main Characters Nora Walker, Oliver Huntsman Main Elements Witches

Be careful of the dark, dark wood…

Especially the woods surrounding the town of Fir Haven. Some say these woods are magical. Haunted, even.

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 long after 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 to have gone missing on that fateful night all those weeks ago.

For as long as there have been fairy tales, we have been warned to fear what lies within the dark, dark woods and in Winterwood, New York Times bestselling author Shea Ernshaw, shows us why.

From New York Times bestselling author of The Wicked Deep comes a haunting romance perfect for fans of Practical Magic, where dark fairy tales and enchanted folklore collide after a boy, believed to be missing, emerges from the magical woods—and falls in love with the witch determined to unravel his secrets.

This book was available for free on RivetedLit.com where I had read and enjoyed a different book by Shae Ernshaw, The Wicked Deep. And I was not disappointed, the two books have a similar vibe. You feel like you are in a kind of fairy tale from some long time ago, and yet it is the modern day just the same. But there is magic, here it is in the Wicker Woods, a place shunned by the locals and only safe for the Walkers to enter on a full moon. Otherwise the trees are angry and dangerous, you might not notice but when they are awake, they don't want you to leave.

On one full moon, Nora Walker enters the wood to look for trinkets, little bits of things that appear in the woods like belt buckles or silver spoons. She doesn't quite know how they get there but her family has been collecting them for years, displayed on shelves around the cabin where the Walker women have lived for generations. See the Walkers are witches, each with a special power of their own. Nora's mother can talk to bees, another could cry so much she turned the Jackdaw Lake bottomless with her tears. But Nora doesn't seem to have a power, perhaps due to her mother wanting so hard to live a normal life and break away from the magic. However Nora wishes her grandmother would have had time to teach her more as Nora loves this life, she belongs to the woods and doesn't want it any other way.

But as she looks for those trinkets in the woods in the winter, after a major storms has snowed in her village and taken out the power and phones, instead of finding a watch or a piece of jewelry she finds a boy. A boy from a camp for Wayward Boys who went missing two weeks ago. She has no idea how he survived, but he's alive...but turns out there is another boy that isn't, who had died at the same time the other went missing. Could this boy Oliver be the murderer? And yet she is drawn to him, he smells of the forest, of pine and winter air. She finds him hard to resist though she doesn't believe she can trust him.

There is a twist to this tale, just as there was in The Wicked Deep. While in the latter it took me till nearly it was exposed to figure it out, this one I figured out withing the first quarter of the book. But rather than ruining it, I found that being pretty sure, but not 100% of course, I enjoyed watching the other characters try to figure out what happened, as the clues are dropped and the pieces come together, sometimes shaking my convinctions but usually I would smile to see how neatly things could be misinterpreted and mislead.

I hope Ernshaw keeps writing books like these, and they keep being made available in October as they are absolutely perfect Halloween reads. They aren't too creepy, but they are eerie, with lovely atmosphere and excellent heroines who live a bit on the outside edges of society but are all the stronger for it. These girls, while they may have friends, don't need them, as they are content within themselves, whether they live in an isolated cabin in the woods or in a lighthouse, and don't long for life in the big city, they know where they belong and their home is a part of them. It's a relief to read a YA novel that isn't about your standard high school concerns of who will take you to the prom, will you be able to join the "cool" group, and what dress to wear on your next date. There's a little bit of that, these are still teenagers after all, but its more about the wood or the sea, and the magic thrumming just beneath the surface.

And the covers...I loved both of them, simple, elegant, beautiful and magical.