The Winter King Kindle Edition

What an atmospheric, gripping, thrilling, dark at times, upper MG with so many amazing messages at the core. Loved this! The author describes the setting as: "set in a Nordic world shaped by the myth of Hades & Persephone, but with twists", & I loved it. Such a cold & dangerous world full of many hardships, but at the same time, you can see so much beauty as well. I loved the mystery of the wolves also, they're my favorite animal. I saw a review mentioning a wolf dying, & I researched but never saw anyone else mention it. I almost let that stop me from reading, & l'm so glad I didn't-because it wasn't even true. This has terrific world/story building. I was so fascinated by the backstory of the God/leaders & this world, & the apparent parallels to our own. Cora is a feisty, brave, strong willed MC, who would do anything to protect her family. Like many people have in our own world, she defies a God who would let awful things happen to her & her family. That's part of any journey in one's faith usually. As well as the many problems with the flesh & blood people in charge of teaching Gods word in each faith. I didn't know if I would enjoy the faith aspects & how Cora was acting, but I'm so glad I read this, because when it all came together....everything she rebelled against, & went through to get to the truth..beautiful. Emotional in the very best of ways. Every detail of this story was brilliantly done. I don't want to spoil, but everything that comes to light, & even how we can compare it to parts of our own world were amazingly done. Very atmospheric winter read full of danger, suspense, family, friendship, bravery, loyalty, great messages, & faith. HIGHLY recommend. BEAUTIFUL cover by Meg Antkowiak too.💜

I’ve never read a story quite like this one and I very much enjoyed it… I’ve already told my daughter it should be her next read.I think maybe I’d like to read it again for all the bits I missed trying to figure out what is going to happen next.Clean. Light romance. Mystery & suspense.

I purchased this book because the cover art is lovely and I was impressed that it had won an award. It was a great read! The characters were well-written and engaging, the storyline was compelling, and the prose is beautiful. The way she spun the allegory into her story is well done and not on the nose. When it comes to religious themes, not a lot of people address how religion can obscure God, nor the ways God works to be revealed to people despite their biases. This book does a marvelous job of weaving that idea seemlessly into the tale.If I had one critique, it would be that the draugr did not play a larger role in the story. Mentioning them earlier on and having the main character encounter one would have made the climax more compelling. That being said, they aren't the primary villains of this story, so I understand the author's choice.Definitely worth the purchase!

Cora Nikolson lives in a village held in the grips of both icy winters and an icy, tyrannical god: the Winter King. The Aldormancy, a class of elite priests, controls access to the god and demand frequent offerings of food and money that gut already impoverished villagers like Cora. Cora has an additional burden—since her father died in a freak fishing accident, the rest of the village thinks she and her family are cursed by the Winter King as punishment for not having enough faith and are treated as second-class citizens, a situation Cora deeply, and understandably, resents. Cora thinks the Winter King is heartless, and is determined to expose him as a fraud. To reach her goal, she takes a job cleaning the Aldormancy headquarters and learns a few secrets about the priesthood. But the Book of the Winter King seems to hold a deeper magic, one that calls out to her and reveals the Winter King to be far different, and far kinder, than she ever knew.I have to admit I didn’t know what to expect when I saw that The Winter King was a novel that was written and published as middle grade fantasy but considered for the Christy Award as YA. I was concerned that it be too whimsical or unsophisticated for a YA novel, yet another example of Christian parents holding back their teen readers in the name of avoiding questionable content. But author Cohen actually manages to pull off something remarkable here—she writes a novel that is thoroughly appropriate for 8-12 year old readers, but will also have something to say to teens and even, yes, adults.The protagonist, Cora, is 15 years old (it isn’t explicitly stated, but we can do the math and figure out her age based on a few references to past events). And while she is certainly no angsty, snarky teenager—she’s far too mature for that—she has many of the same concerns as modern teens. Cora is questioning the faith she grew up in and taking on a great deal of responsibility to help her family. She is also falling in love for the first time. The romance aspect is subtle and sweet, more fairy-tale than modern YA romance. Another example of the sophistication of this novel over typical MG fare is just how flawed the heroine is. Cora is flat-out wrong, though understandably so given her life circumstances, about the nature of the in-story God/Christ (something any young Christian reader will immediately pick up on), and she makes mistakes in her personal life that actually hurt people close to her. Her apparent wrongheadedness about faith, though, is understandable: we have all had exactly the same thoughts and struggles, despite how little we might want to admit it. Young kids will go along with the story on the basis of the plot and characters, but teens will have a deeper understanding. This book is particularly good for younger teens who might be starting to have faith struggles for the first time as they begin to think for themselves and question the world around them. As such, The Winter King is perfectly kid-friendly, but older readers will likely get more out of it.While this is certainly not a dark or gritty novel in any sense, Cohen doesn’t shy away from the hardships of Cora’s life, which gives the novel some real depth and urgency. Cora’s house is cold. Her siblings are too thin and vulnerable to illness. There is never enough food, until she secures a supply from a mysterious young man whose intentions might be sinister. Cora takes on a near-impossible workload to survive and has to walk home alone past curfew, putting her at risk of attack by wolves or zombies. Her family falls ill to a terrible coughing sickness and one of her brothers actually dies. While the hardships are intense, they aren’t any worse than what a young reader would encounter in, say, Little House on the Prairie.Even older readers might catch all the references to C.S. Lewis’s masterpiece Till We Have Faces. The story is quite similar: a young woman hates the gods of her people and stews in resentment before realizing the problem might actually be her. The Christian aspect is never stated overtly, and the novel is technically marketed as a clean read rather than Christian per se, but the allegory is quite obvious. There is a priesthood that resembles the Medieval Catholic church in some regards, a single god who has a sort of death/resurrection story, and a holy book that holds truth and power and that the religious elites desperately don’t want the (mostly illiterate) populace to have access to. It’s a fairly obvious story about the sometimes subtle but profound difference between religion as such, and true faith. It is very much a Christian work.I will admit the pacing is kind of slow and there is not a lot of action, which might make the story a little dull for some younger readers. However, most of the excitement and suspense comes from Cora’s fight for survival and from the intrigue surrounding what the Aldormancy keeps hidden about the Winter King. It probably won’t do it for a young reader who lives on the action-packed, nonstop Percy Jackson series, but those who prefer mystery and character drama over constant action and wisecracking humor will like this very much.This is definitely an excellent novel, surprisingly appropriate for younger readers while deep enough for older ones, and, in my opinion, absolutely should have won the Christy in 2020.

I love this book. I haven’t read a fiction book for a long time and once I got into this I couldn’t put it down. It’s a great story of confusion, fear, control, darkness, lies, and hopelessness turned into Truth, love, the absence of fear, freedom, light, and great hope. It’s also helped me to desire to pray more. I highly recommend it.

This a wonderful, tightly packed, tense, rollercoaster journey of a novel. It rarely lets up, constantly chugging forward with the narrative into even more and more action.There are hardly any moments to stop and catch your breath, the book keeps moving along at a quick clip and this is the books strongest strength.You never really want to stop reading, the book keeps pulling you in for the next little moment, the next reveal, the next escape, the next cover-up, the next sneak, or next encounter, there’s always directly something to look forward to, and for a 300 some page book, it’s wonderful to not have much filler. Every page is chock full of narrative, everything is meaningful, and everything is impactful.From a writing perspective, this is a very tightly-written novel, it is succinct and concise, always communicating clearly what is being said without the need for meandering sentences.Furthermore, the authors descriptive abilities are particularly worth praising. Her descriptions are colourful, vivid, clear, varied, profound, and significantly above the ordinary, the author clearly knows how to describe her scenes, but she accomplished this not merely by describing everything for many long tedious sentences in a row, no, the same brevity and concision that marks the whole book, the ability to waste almost no words, is also present here when the author is being more descriptive than usual. She does not accomplish description at the expense of brevity and effective use of concision. Everything serve a purpose and everything is effective.I personally would describe this book as a piece of writing with very little dross. I imagine most authors are like me, there are thousands more words in our heads than ever make it to the page, but we also know that our work is the better for it, those extra words often are like impurities clinging to a brick of gold, and the job of editing and editors is much like the job of a refiner, to burn away all the dross, the imperfections, the loose ends, the rambling sentences, the unnecessary scenes, to reveal the pure gold bar underneath. Editing a piece of writing is much like pruning a vine, you are truly cutting off actual pieces of the vine, not everything is dead, and in a real way, the process can indeed be painful, you might find yourself cutting off one of your favorite scenes, or best descriptions, or a favorite turn of a phrase, but ultimately like the vine dresser, you know it is for the best, this pruning is what will make the grapes the best then can be, you know there is a direct correlation between your pruning of this vine and the quality of the wine that will come forth from this vine in just a few months.As a really wordy writer and speaker, this is particularly a standout point for me. I know my writing is best when it’s been edited 2,3, and 4 times with tons of words left on the cutting room floor, it’s not easy, but I can tell the difference in my manuscripts particularly when they are delivered orally, those that have edited for brevity and taken from 5,000 words to 3,800-4,000 words are infinitely better than my lengthier manuscripts. This is exactly what I feel about this book, its brevity is amazing, it is what makes it great. And this was the process of lengthy and effective editing. This was done masterfully with this book, everything unnecessary was excised from the book, what’s left is a solid bar of very pure gold in my opinion. Mrs. cohen and her editors are much to be commended for the editing process of this novel, it is practically free of dross and any left over material. Everything is worth its true weight in gold.And in all of this, I haven’t even touched on the narrative itself. Without giving anything away, this story is deep and profound, it is truly meaningful and readily applicable to all of our lives today, particularly from a child’s perspective. There are certain lessons the heroine learns that many adults have come to understand themselves through hardship and suffering, but for many younger kids these mysteries and indeed still mysteries, and I believe they can learn may abiding lessons as they take this trip with Cora as she herself learns several hard lessons about God and the world he made.I also appreciate that while it is not hard to see the allegory, the connection point between the world of the winter king, and our world as created by God, especially in the form of religion, I appreciate that this was never forced and appears very natural, it appears to us in this story almost exactly as it appears to us in our real lives, Cora’s struggles are indeed quite similar to our own, even as adults. And the parallels with faith are spread out evenly and naturally, of course this is a Christian book, with Christian truth at its heart, but it is not heavy handed, ham fisted, attempts to shove faith and truth and theology up your nose, it all really makes sense and fits perfectly into the world,it perfectly in the

Thoroughly enjoyed reading this over Christmas. A warm story for cold winter nights. Love the norse touch. A story of what one girl's courage and love for her family can accomplish.

The Winter King ist ein tiefgehendes Mythos voller Geheimnisse, Spannung, Passion, Drama, Schönheit und Reife. In einem an Skandinavien angelehnten fiktiven Ort hadert die in ärmlichen Verhältnissen lebende Cora nach dem Tod ihres Vaters mit ihrem Schicksal. Deshalb hasst sie im Gegensatz zu allen anderen Dorfbewohnern die lokale Gottheit den Winter König der das Dorf jährlich zur Winterzeit heimgesucht und seine Diener.Gerade für junge Erwachsene werden existentielle Themen wie Leid, Gerechtigkeit, Liebe, Treue, Schuld und Sühne fundiert und erzählerisch faszinierend entwickelt. Ideales Lesematerial zur Weihnachtszeit.

I was in a reading slump for weeks this winter. Couldn't get into any books and was feeling discouraged that everything I picked up seemed so flat.Then I ran across Mrs. Cohen on Instagram, and decided to give the story a try.I may not have gone into it with high hopes, but I was hooked from the first page. The setting captivated me, the continuity of the world-building was perfect, and the characters...They all seemed to take on a life of their own, especially Cora and Peder. I loved them both so much. When Cora's internal struggle was first introduced, my world view prompted me to skepticism of her woes, but as the story went on, I began to believe along with Cora in the injustice of the world. Her problems are presented in such a sympathetic way, I couldn't help but hurt for her and her family.I loved The Winter King because of the thread of hope woven into the allegory. Subtle enough not to be annoying, but strong enough to create a beautiful theme through the whole story. 💛

This is a wonderful story, retelling of a myth but also touching on themes such as friendship, truth, redemption, bitterness, forgiveness, freedom, tyranny, family etc etc. Wonderfully developed main character and great plot.