Top Five Winter Reads

Hello!

So I have read a total of twenty six books so far this year and I can’t quite believe it yet but it’s true. This year started off really well but overall I think it has balanced itself out by having quite a few two/three starred reads.

Now that winter is over where I live, I thought why not follow Regan from PeruseProject by doing this! So today, we are here for the top five books that really earned their five stars.

Mind you, this is a personal ranking and in no way reflects everyone’s thoughts on the books. So, if you didn’t enjoy the following books, that’s fair and valid. Almost all of them are fantasy and it shouldn’t really be a surprise anymore. I mean. It’s me we are talking about. I will always choose fantasy over anything else. Oops?

Anyway let’s get into them, shall we?

 

The Wicker King by K. Ancrum

 It’s about two best friends who both suffer from attachment issues and their friendship sometimes borders on something more and as one of the friends start losing their grip on reality, it’s the other one who starts to suffer just as much. This book has such good mental illness and questioning sexuality representation. It is not an easy read by all means but if you stick to it, the end result is so satisfying and frankly, as one of the first books I read in the year, this one will still stay with me for a long while even after the year is over.

 

Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield

 On a dark midwinter night, while the locals are enjoying their drinks, a stranger comes in with a seemingly dead child who then breathes again. This story takes place around this astonishing incident but there’s more than that involved and god, the writing and the atmosphere of the book is so good. I absolutely loved it. It is slow paced and there’s no dramatic events that shock the reader but in its pace, it works wonders and the characters are so fleshed out and mystery of the child keeps you reading further and further.

 

 

The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson

So, last year, I finally started to read Brandon Sanderson’s books and boy, was it a blessing! I also started reading The Mistborn trilogy, and this final installment took me a while to finish for some reason. However, this book was such a great conclusion to the trilogy. The first book was absolutely brilliant, the second one was mind-blowing and the third one, The Hero of Ages was so freaking good!

I can see why people have been raving and gush about this series because the writing is so easy to follow along and the plots so incredibly complex and well thought out. The mind boggles, okay? I am in love with this trilogy and nobody can do anything about it.

 

The Girl In the Tower by Katherine Arden

 Dare I even say anything about this one? After the wonder that was The Bear and the Nightingale, I knew I was in for a treat with this one. It started out a bit slow for me and the fact that it didn’t focus on Vasya at first didn’t endear me to it initially but trust me, after the first fifty pages, this one took off and made me aware that Katherine Arden knew what she was doing. God, this one was so much better than the first one somehow. We see Vasya grown up from being a precocious child, trying to fit into the world and her family trying to make sure they survive it all.

In between that, there’s the matter of other forces of the magical kind and to further complicate the matters is Grand Prince of Moscow. It was absolutely wonderful to step back into this world and trust me, nobody would regret this ride.

 

The Winter of the Witch by Katherine Arden

 You know when people say that some books are the stunning conclusions to series and such? Yeah, this one was one of those books. If the second book in the trilogy was full of bated breaths and what will happen next to Vasya, then this one upped the stakes and made it epic. After the events of the second book’s ending, Vasya is once again in peril and in a world of men trying to finish her, she has to find a way to survive.

The journey was so good and often confusing in the best sense. If I had one thing that I had a little problem with then it would be the romance, it wasn’t quite as engaging as I thought it would be. That could just be me though for I have seen so many shipping them so hard. But yeah, overall, this series deserves all the stars it has had.

These were my top five winter reads of this year, what about you? Have you read any of these? Tell me about your favourites in the comments below.