Rachel's Reviews > The Winter King

Wow. This book hit me a lot harder than I was expecting. I went into it thinking, "Okay, a fantasy winter story for early teens could be fun" and came out thinking, "That was so intense and illuminating!"

This book started a little slowly, but it built steadily until I was totally gripped by Cora's fight to find a way to save her family and understand her god. It can be read as an allegory for the Protestant Reformation, with sacred texts and the truth they hold being withheld from the common people, but also as simply a coming-of-age story of a determined young woman trying to make sense of her world with too little guidance. I'm labeling it as Christian fiction, but it's not overtly Christian, only allegorically so.

Oh, and before you start comparing the "coughing sickness" to Covid-19 too strongly -- this book was published in 2019, before the virus was in our public consciousness here in the US. So that's totally a coincidence.