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One-sentence summary:
Challenging to read because of its sudden tense changes, Winter is a paranormal romance filled with confusing powers, easily seduced young women and a story that leaves a lot to be desired.
Longer Musings
Winter focuses on the lives of four orphans and their matron who live in Ravensdale, an English or Irish town with fields; tiny houses and friendly locals. There’s Chastity who burns with unmitigated passion for her soon-to-be military fighter, Hugh. Then comes Leah, the practical and down-to-earth resident who looks after everyone when the matron, Vivian, is away and, finally, the bookworm, Geneve.
Oh, and there’s also a gang of triplets who have just recently joined the crew under mysterious circumstances.
Despite the book starting with Chastity finding an almost dead blue-haired man in a field and her lover disappearing off to a potentially tragic war zone — S.D Rasheed adds even more problems that her protagonists have to deal with by the way of a plague that has quarantined them to a specific area.
The books poses many questions — how does Vivian have enough money to run entire orphanage for only four girls? Why does a practical down-to-earth woman fall in love with a mysterious man for no reason? Why do the main characters always wait an extra day before doing what they should’ve done a sunrise earlier?
Normally you can forgive a work for not answering these queries, especially one written from a first-person perspective. Except, in Winter, the narrative jumps from character to character depending on the whim of the author. So, by way of narrative shift, S.D. Rasheed strips away the tension from the novel. I wasn’t watching with Chastity as her friend twisted and distorted into something else and had to guess (along with her) what was happening; rather, I already knew what had happened because I’d spent some time in another character’s head for several more info-dumps and teen angst. And the worst part of this narrative choice was that even though there were three women talking in first person throughout the novel, I couldn’t tell the difference between them. I often had to go back and read the explanation of whose head I was in at the start of the chapter to ensure I knew who was talking to me.
Then, as if conceding that too many questions had gone unanswered, S.D Rasheed finishes the book from the warlock’s perspective (still in a similar style to all the others). This allowed her to explain away all the various plot holes that had accumulated up to that point. (Almost, some of them never went away.)
Which leads us to the narrative, and it is one that has no real beginning, middle or end. I understand that this type of meandering, inter-connected series of vignettes became popular with Twilight. And that’s fine, I can defend Twilight because at its core it has a focus: Bella and Edward. Winter, unfortunately, spreads itself too thin. It has too many characters with too many contradicting motivations leading to a conclusion that is less ending and more setup for the next novel. Really, for me, Winter was a prologue that could’ve been incorporated into the narrative of a longer novel.
Tragically, all of this is tied up in writing that struggles to know whether it is in the present or in the past. There’s a significant number of flashbacks or stories told by the character speaking at the time, but the way they’ve been put to paper, they become difficult to follow. Often times I couldn’t tell if the speaker (Chastity, Vivian, Winter or Leah) were discussing something that was happening in front of them or something that had happened previously and they were telling the reader about it in the present.
Overall, I was often confused whose head I was in, where I was and what was happening on the very page I was reading.
Conclusion
Winter is a run-of-the-mill paranormal novel that has taken on much more than it can handle. The narrative jumped between characters so quickly that none of them were able to leave any lasting impression on me, had too many plot holes that created irritation instead of tension, and was written in a way that made it difficult to tell whether the tale being told (at the time) was set is in the past or present. There are a lot better paranormal novels than this one. I’d suggest Amanda Hocking, Stephanie Meyer or The Paper Magician instead.
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