Meredith Monday Schwartz

the kind of ending that makes you understand why the book needed all of those 544 previous pages.

I think if you liked, like I did, Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, this one will absolutely work for you.

The voiciness, the richly imagined...

historical setting, the slow and deliberate world building, the feeling of being in the hands of a narrator who's been alive long enough to find humans genuinely interesting.

All of those vibes that worked so well in that other book are here.

And I want to be clear too, this is not romantic.

There is a love story and it's a good one, but this is high fantasy, the real kind with a monster hunt, the aforementioned demons,

a hilarious succubus, and centuries of complicated history.

If you go in expecting Romantasy or a quick milkshake read, you will be confused and disappointed.

But if you go in as a high fantasy reader who's ready to be transported, I think you're going to have a spectacular trip.

This is The Red Winter by Cameron Sullivan.

I think that those two books could, yeah, definitely would find a lot of the same readers.

I kept saying to Johnny, like, I feel like I've been reading this book for 102 years.

But I also, like I said, did not want to go.

I didn't want to like skip to the end.

I really wanted to see what was going to happen.

I was going to say, I wasn't getting Spanish from it until you just said it.

Okay.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, this is one that I've had on my shelf forever and it falls into that special part of my shelf that I have books that are literary fiction.