Hi everyone! Well, this is the second book I read written by Shea Ernshaw and it hasn’t disappointed me. If you have read The Wicked Deep you definitely have to read this one!

Title: Winterwood

Author: Shea Ernshaw

Genre: YA Fiction, Paranormal, Romance

Publishing Date/Publisher: November 5, 2019/ Simon Schuster Books for Young Readers (I had seriously no idea that this was published on my birthday!😂)

Nora Walker is from a family of witches but unfortunately she hasn’t yet discovered her nightshade, that is her special kind of magic and that bothers her. Her mother for example, could work magic with honeybees. She could collect their honey without being stung and could even tame the wildest of them. Nora’s grandmother, for instance, could enter into people’s dreams and calm them to make them feel better.

One snowy full moon night, Nora enters the Wicker Woods, the forest believed to be magical and haunted and which only the Walkers could enter. She finds a boy, Oliver, lying on the ground, freezing to death in the cold. Nora decides to help him and she brings him to her place. Nora soon finds out that Oliver is a strange boy with forest green eyes who smells of the forest and pine but who also holds many secrets just like her.

Nora wants to trust Oliver but she cannot make herself trust him completely. Unless she finds out how Oliver could have survived for two whole weeks in the freezing cold of winter in those magical and cruel woods, she could never trust him because if she is sure of one thing it is that Oliver wasn’t alone that night his memory went blank…

About the Author:

Shea Ernshaw an American author is the New York Times bestselling author of Winterwood, The Wicked Deep and A Wilderness of Stars. Her debut novel, The Wicked Deep was released in 2018 of March. She also has a debut adult fiction novel, A History of Wild Places which will soon be released this December 2021.

Source of picture: simonandschuster.com

My ratings: 4.9/5

This book made me remember a time when I was little in which I went to Rodrigues and we went to a nature park. I remember about the tortoises (they were so big!) and then we went to visit a cave. Their was a nature guide who was leading us in and my sister and I were in the front and then she and I sang this song, it was a song my mother has downloaded in a CD along with other stories for us to listen in the car. It starts like this but I don’t think I remember it perfectly but here it is:

In the dark, dark woods…there was a dark, dark house…in the dark, dark house, there was a dark, dark room…in the dark, dark room there was a dark, dark shelf…in the dark, dark shelf, there was a dark, dark book…in the dark, dark book, there was a GHOST! *creepy boos*

Well, let us be serious now. The thing I love the most about this book is how everything is revealed almost at the end so all along the book you just wonder about Oliver and Nora. The fact that the characters are so well built and so mysterious is lovely but it had some similarities to The Wicked Deep as well, like Oliver had those dark green eyes just like Bo from The Wicked Deep and the fact that both Bo tries to keep Penny save and Oliver also doesn’t want to hurt Nora and vice-versa AND the fact that they fall in love with each other.

Otherwise, it was great and I really want to try out all those spells and instructions in the spellbook belonging to Nora AND thankfully *sighs out of relief* it doesn’t require a wand and complicated mutterings *phew*.

Would I recommend it? Well, yes! To all people who love Shea Ernshaw’s writing and who have read The Wicked Deep AND to all people who love a little dash of magic in the cauldron!

Happy Saturday! (and weekend)

~Hermione