Calendar Girls - Dec 2018 - best book set in the winter - #CalendarGirlsBooks #CanadianContent #Blogmas

Welcome back to Calendar Girls, originated by bloggers, Flavia the Bibliophile and Melanie Noell Bernard it's now hosted by Katie of Never Not Reading and Adrienne of Darque Dreamer Reads. Calendar Girls is now in its second year as a monthly blog event inspired by Neil Sedaka’s 1961 song Calendar Girl. Just like in the song, they've decided to use a specific theme for each month and choose a book based on these themes! The event is meant to incite discussions with other bloggers about books we’ve read and loved, is meant to help bloggers meet other bloggers, and also for bloggers and readers to find out about blogs which they normally may not have come across! Want to know more? Click on the links above! And it’s never too late to jump on the Calendar Girl train! Join now!

Let it Snow: Best Book Set in the Winter 

You may have noticed a distinct lack of posting from me this year. I just completely fell out of the habit of blogging. Every time I thought about getting back into it I was just too busy or too uninspired to actually do it though. But I pledged to do Blogmas as a concerted way of getting myself back into blogging. So here we are on day 3 and Calendar Girls was a perfect tool to help me get back into the swing of writing. Now, onto the topic at hand, books set in the winter. A handful immediately came to mind, there's The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, of course, an almost lifelong favourite of mine which is set, at least partially, in a Narnian winter. Tree of Seasons was another good book that was also partially set in the winter. Then there's The Giver which ends in the winter. And, Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising is specifically set over Christmas. I feel like all of those can count, but none of them is what I'm picking. No, my top 2 contenders are Kelley Armstrong's A Darkness Absolute and Tyrell Johnson's The Wolves of Winter. Both of which I really loved, and both of which are incidentally Canadian AND incidentally set in the northern territories of Canada in the winter.

Right then, which one ended up being my pick for the best book set in the winter? Let's see:

 The Wolves of Winter by Tyrell Johnson

Forget the old days. Forget summer. Forget warmth. Forget anything that doesn’t help you survive.

Lynn McBride has learned much since society collapsed in the face of nuclear war and the relentless spread of disease. As memories of her old life haunt her, she has been forced to forge ahead in the snow-covered Canadian Yukon, learning how to hunt and trap to survive.

But her fragile existence is about to be shattered. Shadows of the world before have found her tiny community—most prominently in the enigmatic figure of Jax, who sets in motion a chain of events that will force Lynn to fulfill a destiny she never imagined.
-- via Goodreads

I won't go into too much detail about the book itself because I did write a review of it last year when I received my ARC copy. I want to focus on why I picked this over A Darkness Absolute. It was an incredibly tough choice for me and a very, very close call. Kelley Armstrong is one of my top five favourite authors. It's one of my long-term reading goals to read everything she's written. I even got to meet her in February of this year which was so exciting. So I do feel bad for not picking her book as the best. But, I do have my reasons and I think they're good ones! There are a lot of similarities between Johnson and Armstrong's books. They both focus on strong-willed, tough female characters who for reasons not completely in their control have been pushed out of a stable life into the wilds of the Yukon. They're both about mysteries - but VERY different kinds. Armstrong's is your standard whodunnit murder mystery just set against a backdrop of a very remote northern village. It's the setting and characters that make her book interesting. Whereas Johnson's mystery is a dystopian one there's a mystery around what happened and why and why people are after the main character. In this book, the setting and characters are a central part of the plot and vice-versa. Obviously, they're very different genres with very different points and characters, but the similarities between them really amuse me.

The main, main reason I chose this book, in the end, is actually very simple given how hard of a choice it was for me. In the end, even though I rated both books 5 stars and I loved them both, I chose Wolves of Winter because I actually remember the plot, I remember the characters and I remember the ending. As I was thinking about A Darkness Absolute I realised, that I can't remember how it ended or who the killer actually turned out to me. It didn't stick with me and I think that's a sign of something.

What do you think the best book set in the winter is?

Adrienne's December post | Katie's December post