Review of Winterwood by Shea Ernshaw

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.

Winterwood really captures the feeling of late 2000s YA, where insta-love was everywhere and every protagonist seemed to spend a whole book whining about how hard their life was. Thw Walker women are incredible witches, gothic and mysterious with unusual abilities, able to charm bees, cry lakes and whisper to spiders. Unfortunately we get saddled with Nora, who is bloody annoying.

The story is vaguely (very vaguely) similar to Beware The Wild, a 5 star read where people go missing in a small town with a creepy swamp, it has the same gothic vibes and mystery but this book didn't really seem to go anyway. I guessed the big reveal a hundred pages in so had to sit around waiting to confirmed right for another 200 pages.

Nora and Oliver are... well I can't call them a good couple when they fall into the insta-love category. Again with the late 2000s tropes it very much feels like Nora Might Just Die Of A Broken Heart if she loses the boy she found having a nap in the woods a couple of hours ago. Get your shit together girl.

What was going on with Nora's mother during this book? She never made an appearance. Nora talked about her constantly and yeah she was on holiday or something but it was so weird that a character that was spoken about throughout the whole book never once made an appearance in the final chapters.

The ending was a complete cop out, come on. It was like the author had written it a different way, told that was too depressing and had to scramble to edit a nicer ending in later. I didn't like the ending at all, it was far too neatly packaged.