Status Updates From Winter Rose (Winter Rose, #1)

There are plenty of valid criticisms of this piece (the movements between Lynn Hall, the well, the woods, and home begin to become repetitious) but at its core its obsession with truth and fiction, and its complex take on sisters, family, and dare I say an autistic lead feel so fleshed out. It's not for everyone, but it is absolutely for me.

Getting to the fifty percent mark and just like Fire and Hemlock it plays so well with parallel worlds. The Tam Lin ballad really can inspire such fantastic retellings.

They really don't write them how they used to. The movements in here make everything feel both dangerous and romantic. There's never any fear this work has in not letting the reader in on everything and for that I think it's been phenomenal so far.

You killed his father. You turn his words to leaves. You take away his eyes, his voice. You don't love him. Why do you care where he goes?"
"Because he is mine, of my blood and of the wood. Love and hate are nothing more than leaves here; he knows that. He was not born to learn them."

i love how she writes fae, fucking terrifying

"Do you care for me at all? Or do you only need me?"
His hand opened to my face; I felt only the cool invisible leaves. I lifted my own hand; in the light our shadows touched.
"You come to me," he whispered. "Into every dark place. Into every memory. Into the empty eyes of winter. I go alone and find you with me. Why do you care for me?"
I did not know until I spoke. "Because you are making me human."

*screams*

"Who are you?" I whispered. She was something wild in my wood, the glint of an eye on a lightless night, the formless shadow the moon reveals tangled in the shadow of a tree. "Who are you?"
"I am night," she said, and it was. "I am winter's song," and I heard it. "I am the shadow of the bloody moon and all the winds that harvest in it." I felt them. "I am the dead of winter."
She wore my mother's face.

disl jezomor

"I thought I knew what you were, who I was, but you changed under my eyes, and so has Laurel and so has the wood, and I don't know anymore what I am except a woman who sees too much.'
"I know. I always knew."
"What did you always know?"
"That you see with the wood's eyes."

You lied to both of us... I believed you...
YOU SAW ME. I COULD NEVER PRETEND TO YOU... YOU SAW ME TOO WELL 💔

But they didn't know where to look, or how to see. I thought I did. Doors, he had said. Thresholds. Places of passage, where gold fell from one story into another, where time shifted across the boundary between worlds.

✨️