The Winter Long

This is one of those books I wish goodreads used a 10-star scale for, so that most of my normal 5-star books are actually 9 stars and the truly excellent, absolute favorite are 10-star. This is a 10-star book! Despite it taking 5 days for me to read this (because, life) I stayed up just a little later when I neared the end to finish it.

Obviously, if I'm at book 8 of this series, I love Seanan McGuire's story-telling and writing. This book is the culmination point of the previous seven books. She started the foundation right at the beginning of book 1 and has been fore-shadowing and laying hints about the plot, characters, and action in this book in all the previous books.

You can bolster your enjoyment of this book by also reading McGuire's available short stories at her website and joining her Patreon to get the short stories there. I read the ones related to The Luidaeg and Tybalt. They give you background on the secondary characters and the a little on the villains in this story.

I had gotten used to McGuire's structure for these stories, where about half-way through, Toby has defeated some problem, but obviously there's half the book left so she has more to do. I did not get that feeling in this book. This is not the story where she encounters a problem that gets solved/doesn't get solved and leads to the next problem. It is the story where she thinks what is the issue is not the issue, but there isn't a mid-point to it. It just keeps going to the end.

These aren't mysteries, but I did figure out who Quentin was about 2 books prior to the reveal when McGuire started hinting at it with blind fosterage. I tend to figure out a lot of the "hinted" items. However, I was completely surprised in chapter 8 of this book in the library. As I was reading the pages, I thought to myself, I should really know what's going to happen next because she's giving all sorts of hints. And I was still surprised. The fact that I can figure things out well before they are revealed and still have other things be a complete surprise, and still just love the journey of October Daye is a treat!

As of right now, there are five more books in the series, and another set of short stories I have not yet read to go through. And I'm excited to dive in. Because while we've had some mysteries solved, this book opens up a whole new set of mysteries for Toby.