Winterkeep

4.5 starsThe Graceling series is my favorite series so you can imagine how excited I was about this book. Seeing familiar faces, meeting new characters and exploring more of the world is all so exciting.Winterkeep takes place five years after Bitterblue. There has already been contact between the Royal Continent (aka Seven Kingdoms) and Torla where our main setting of Winterkeep is located. Torla is east of The Dells so the world has been expanded even more since Bitterblue. We have five perspectives: Bitterblue, Lovisa, a young woman from Winterkeep, Giddon, a telepathic fox and a sea creature. Two of Bitterblue’s men drowned under mysterious circumstances so Bitterblue, Giddon, Hava and some of Bitterblue’s people travel to Winterkeep to uncover the truth.I love seeing old faces. I love Bitterblue. She isn’t perfect, has grown up a lot and is more mature. She has some serious problems with her country and it has changed in five years but is also a work in progress. Hava has really come out of her shell and I love that. She doesn’t have to hide anymore and is so snarky and sassy. I didn’t like Giddon in Graceling but liked him a lot more in Bitterblue. I love how he loves Bitterblue, looks after Hava and his work with the Council. Giddon and Hava really lean on each other and I love seeing them work together. Their bickering is adorable.It took some time for me to realize how I felt about Lovisa. Lovisa is manipulative and snoopy at the beginning. I was like what is she doing half the time. Then after the middle I could see a lot of love and care in her. A bit of guilt and the desire to make up for it. The burden her parents leave on her and how she wants to be better, make a difference and move past her resentment towards her parents. She has great potential to make a difference.I love the silbercows which are like telepathic purple seals, the foxes and the sea creature. Unexpectedly provided a lot of helpful info and insight. I love their roles in this story and the surprise amount of emotional attachment I have to them.World-building is still amazing as always. The descriptions, the different cultures, languages and technology. All so interesting and I love to seeing the expansion of this world.This book is slow. Not the entire time but there are so slow parts. The way Kristin Cashore writes this book is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. You get piece by piece in each chapter. At some point you see some of the picture but there is still time needed in order to reveal the big picture. Then you are like “oh I see what is going on”. This isn’t a fast-paced book but I enjoyed uncovering the mysteries of Winterkeep. I’m all for this pace because it is a slow build and I can see connections being made and I truly enjoy unraveling the mysteries. It may not be for everyone though.This doesn’t feel like the end. There are some things that were not quite wrapped up and I’m hoping for another book one day. Fingers crossed!

I love the graceling books soooo much! This book was a wonderful adventure! I literally couldn’t put this book down! My only problem was that I really didn’t like the character Lovisa Cavenda. The book is mainly about her and she’s a really hard character to like.. even in the end I still didn’t care for her at all. Other than her I LOVED this book!

I recommend the whole series!

NO SPOILERS.Winterkeep was well-marketed and incredibly well-written. What drew me in as a companion to the other Graceling Realm novels, which I admit gave me pause, as I didn't feel any book needed or could benefit from further addition--and was happily proven wrong. Others I know of were drawn by the artwork of this and Bitterblue's covers or by the idea of telepathic and bonded foxes that are similar to familiar, pets, and companions who choose the person.The incredibly political left and right wing of a corrupt government with originally positive intentions is neither idolized nor demonized, but represented as an ideal that got lost in the trappings of human greed that came into fruition through complacency and human flaws in decision making, each decision either furthering the individuals from their goals or steering them toward personal ones instead. It shows the inevitable progress of and consequences of decisions and single-minded thinking.This book also demonstrates the duplicity of personas, the ego and dismissal of different-minded characters, and the folly of assumptions and loyalty for personal gain.The coming-of-age portions of the story are well conceived and well-realized through Ad's conversations with his siblings, Lovisa's struggles with truth and consequences, and Bitterblue's and Giddon's private connection to each other when each believes they will never see the other again. My favorite personal growth story here, however is that of the Silbercows who actively seek companionship with the Keeper and describe her later as the reality in contrast to the stories they themselves had presented to her.My biggest complaint about this story, and the reason it did not earn my final star, is that while most plotholes were concluded, they felt patched rather than completed. There was no explanation for the female guards assistance in some things and complicity in others. Simple evacuation or death of opposition and ignorance of incurious staff during highly abnormal circumstances were improbable at best, but the writing of the main storyline certainly made these easy to overlook.Some unrequested suggestions follow. An epilogue of the keeper's recovery would have been satisfactory considering her thorough character evolution with endless begrudging, yet selfless sacrifices. Readers may benefit from mini novellas or even a compilation of short stories to address the story gaps in this and in each of the other Gracelings books. I, personally, would jump at instantly purchasing those the second I found out about them.Dear author, if you see this, please consider these suggestions; the same solutions worked incredibly favorably for Anne Bishop's Black Jewels series (my favorite), and though this is entirely different, the current political climate with the marketing this book has achieved makes this a strong suggestion for readers with a sense of personal understanding and similar experience.Respectfully,A Fan.

This is the fourth book in a series of well-written adventure stories of unique characters. Suitable for young adults due to inclusions of abuse, violence, death and sexual activities. It’s full of secrets, human weaknesses and strengths, creature strengths, friendships, fantastical abilities of both humans and creatures, and amazing discoveries.

Like most of Cashore's work, Winterkeep explores the effect and legacies of abusive parents and troubled childhoods. Thematically and in tone I would place this one more closely aligned with Bitterblue than either Fire or Graceling, not only because of the characters involved but because of the use of multiple perspectives and the political themes. It is worth noting that there is much more explicit sexual content than in any of the previous books in this series.Personally, I think Cashore excels at romance, relationships, and adventure but oversimplifies political themes in a way that is a disservice to both the reader and the narrative. For that reason, I don't love Bitterblue and Winterkeep as much as Fire and Graceling for this reason. But if you loved Bitterblue, I expect you'll love this one!

Note: you can read the book as a stand-alone novel, but there‘ll be stuff and people mentioned here that won’t mean anything to you then… and since the „Graceling“-series is just plain wonderful, I totally recommend to start with the first installment.ReviewReading some not too positive reviews about „Winterkeep“, I was a bit apprehensive about diving into it. I was afraid that it could possibly ruin my love for the previous books, but I needn’t have worried. Kristin Cashore wrote a wonderful new book that wasn’t my favorite in the series, but that fit the series and was a good novel with a strong plot and characters.A new continent was discovered and with it unknown countries that have developed differently than Monsea, the Dells and the other magical kingdoms. Diplomatic exchange with the land of Torla has started, but two of queen Bitterblue’s envoys have disappeared and when other questions about the conduct of the Torlans arise, Bitteblue, Hava and Giddon travel abroad to investigate.Right from the beginning, nothing works out the way it was planned. Bitterblue gets separated from her friends and court, Giddon and Hava start investigating secretly and a new character from Torla, 16 year old Lovisa, fights her own hard fight for what is right and to save the people she loves. So, I can’t tell you much more without spoiling stuff, although I can tell you that there are also magical creatures that can communicate telepathically and who guard their own secrets.You probably guessed it, there is a lot going on, yet it’s not too much, every thread gets the page time it needs to be resolved sufficiently. Since people like Lovisa weren’t too likable at the beginning (although one gets the why of it pretty soon…), her parts were a bit lengthy, but that got a lot better with time (and then her development is a good thing to watch). The romance was OK, although it wasn’t the most important thing for me, and I liked it a lot, when things clicked together in the end.I also really liked the steampunkish world of Torla that is vastly different from the medieva based world of the prequels. What made me detract one star, is the not too subtle moral message and the subsequent allocation of the good vs. evil in this world. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all game with the message in real life, but I am a strict escapist reader (as fantasy readers mostly are) and therefore don’t appreciate the realities pushed into my dreamlands. I totally get it that other people think differently about this.Nevertheless, I liked the book a lot and I am glad I read it.

The continuing adventures of Queen Bitterblue, with intrigue and telepathic foxes, environmental issues and family drama. Negotiating a foreign country while investigating crimes and political machinations. I highly recommend this, it made me cry several times 🙂

I loved this novel. I've read all of Cashore's Graceling series and enjoyed them thoroughly, and Winterkeep is a wonderful extention of her world.I just finished reading it and have pre ordered Seasparrow, which I am equally as excited to dive into.

In “Winterkeep”, the fourth book of the Graceling Realm series, Cashore crafts an entirely new continent to the east of the seven nations. There are no Gracelings nor Monsters there, but other strange telepathic creatures, and the political system on this new continent is wildly different from the monarchies prevalent in the seven nations. This new world is described in nearly the same level of detail as the worlds in the previous books of the series, but I thought the depiction of the new geographics fell a bit short this time.The story is one of friendship, secrets, and political intrigues as we follow the young queen Bitterblue and her court on their journey to the foreign continent. But even more interesting than the old familiar (and beloved) characters from “Bitterblue”, are the ones new to the series, and personally, I definitely felt connected to their individual lives and stories. I additionally thought the altering narrative perspectives were suitable to the stories that are told, and I always found myself looking forward to the moments these viewpoints intersected.However, I found the book a bit lacking in terms of romance, since several of its characters seemed to be too much of players for my liking and the major relationship seemed quite certain and thus the storyline evolving around it rather boring.In short, although the book does not quite achieve the level of wonders of “Fire” and “Bitterblue”, I did greatly enjoy reading it and am determined that, if Cashore continues writing the Graceling Realm series, I will read everything she comes up with.