A review by rayn0n
The Winter Road by Adrian Selby

5.0

I cannot believe this book took me almost three years to read and still managed to turn me around into being genuinely invested by the end. It wasn't necessarily the world-building that bigged me down so much as how l o n g some of those chapters in the first part are, that one is over 40 pages! I'm no good with fantasy politics and geography but the characters still had enough meat on them that I got really invested, their plughts resonated with me without becoming the sort of story where the stakes are so high it burns me out. The way they use magic, natural, fairly subtle for the most part, was really interesting and the entire fight brew system was FASCINATING. Really drew me in from the beginning. Tbh, if I hadn't looked up the author I wouldn't have believed it was written by a man, Selby avoids all the pitfalls that makes men writing from the perspective of women so overt and painful and when I tell you I was shocked that the narrator was a woman in those first couple chapters. I was fully prepared to sit through a fantasy adventure expecting it to be a company of mostly men, given the theme of feudal mercenaries, and I'm a little ashamed of my prejudice. I'm glad it was Teyr, I suppose is what I'm saying, and Selby did a fantastic job building a world that broke out of a lot of the stereotypes and gender roles the fantasy genre generally leans into without making it an overt statement on anything, it's exactly everything I could've hoped it to be without having any idea what I was getting myself into, picking this book up at the beginning of the Pandemic because I was on a viking kick and this looked appropriately viking-ish.