Winterling

* * * * */ Five Stars

Genre: Action, Adventure, Fiction, Fantasy, (some light) Humor, Suspense, Mystery, Danger

In this enchanting book by Sarah Prineas, you meet Fer, a teenage girl who lives with her grandmother. Fer tries to live a normal life, but getting too close to town, riding the bus away from the edge of the wood where she lives, twists her stomach into knots. She always feels more at home wandering outside in the forest than she does inside with her peers. When she meets Rook, everything changes. Rook is a puck, a human with the natural ability to shape shift using small mementos called 'shiftier-bones', and he came through a Way, a portal to another place filled with magic, after being run out of his home by the Mor. Following him back through, Fer meets the Mor, the leader of the kingdom that they stand in, the Summerlands. As Fer begins to embrace this strange new land, she will uncover many dark secrets about the land itself, the mysterious Mor, and even her own late parents. Will she be able to save the Summerlands and stop the wicked Mor, or will she suffer the fate her mother did if she fails?
I really loved the way Prineas crafts her novels in general, and I have already written about another series of hers, The Magic Thief, but this book series was truly outstanding by my standards. Rich and detailed while still being shorter than 400 pages per book in this series, Winterling is a modern take on the old views of magic and of leadership that will someday become a classic. I recommend it to anyone looking for an old-fashioned adventure with some new twists and turns.