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Hello to all my SPFBO lovelies! I have another review for you! Once again, I went into this book cold without being familiar with the author, the book, or reviews for the book ahead of time. I prefer this approach because I don’t want anyone elses’s impressions floating around my head as I try and form my own opinions on it.
This is a story that fits the winter weather I’m experiencing right now. It’s cold as fuck in Pell, and it’s cold as fuck in Pennsylvania (with wind chill it’s -30 in parts of PA right now, and that’s almost to the point where it doesn’t matter if I use C or F, so I won’t). I could feel the cold of the story. It’s so cold in Pell that the residents have to leave the city when winter hits — it’s just too cold to survive. We meet the village and our characters as they are prepping for their seasonal evacuation, where they head south to a larger city. Some folks are looking forward to it, others find this a pain in the ass, and some of the craziest motherfuckers stay in Pell.
However, this winter is a little different from the ones that came before it. There are monsters/hunters that come with snowstorms this year. No one really understands why they’re there, and they are driven to kill everyone they come across. Our POVs start to drop as they encounter these monsters, and there’s a definite skill in making you care about so many different characters in such a short time, to the point where they are memorable and impactful. The invading hunters weren’t called orcs, but they’re larger and stronger than humans, and described with greyish skin and an unnatural speed for their size. At first, I thought they were going to be a mindless invading force, which I don’t tend to resonate with that kind of backstory — big bad evil guys with no inner motivations. However, it turns out these hunters/orcs didn’t just accidentally bump paths with these mountain folk… someone/something has drawn them there, and they’re going to get what they came for.
This is a multipov book and we kind of head hop around different villagers, there are too many to go into how I felt about each character, but I think my favorite was Cerin. She’s the kind of gal who will scale down mountains in blizzard conditions with hunters on her trail to try and help the group.
Each of the characters was very well fleshed out, even the ones that didn’t make it to the end — yeah, not all the POVs make it to the end, but I actually deeply enjoy that. It feels strange to say I like it when the point of view characters die, but I much prefer it over plot armor. I can tolerate plot armor once, maybe twice in a story… but unless you’re writing a satire where the main character’s secret power is to survive things they shouldn’t (Rincewind) or some kind of earned skill in a litrpg, I will increasingly struggle to maintain my suspension of disbelief with each additional instance of “how’d they make it through that?” The fact that some of the characters die on page within their POV creates a whole new level of tension when reading. This isn’t a long book, it’s something like 300 pages, but since so much was happening after the first quarter of the book, the pacing got up to breakneck speeds in the back half of the book.
This has an old school medievalish setting, Pell sounds like a typical medieval city with a blacksmith, baker, miners, farmers — there’s swords, bows, and arrows, folks get around by mount and some of the mounts are fantasy animals. There’s a light dusting of handwavey magic, like portals that open up in stone, that adds flavor without making things complicated and bogged down.
The pacing at the beginning was a touch slower because we kept hopping heads into different POVs, and each time that happened, I had to do a little reset in my head to get re-invested in the story. However, that was quickly remedied, and I found myself pounding through the latter half of the book, which I read in one sitting. As I mentioned before, it’s not a long book, so it didn’t meander or feel bloated, everything is in there for a reason and there’s nothing I would cut to “tighten the story”. You kind of understood the plot from the start — try not to die.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with this and would recommend it to folks looking for a quick read during this extra cold winter.