A Winter’s Promise is the cover buy of all cover buys. And I’m not ashamed to admit it.

Ophelia has always lived on Anima. Everyone there is family; everything is familiar. Even the objects are familiar, since all Ophelia has to do is touch them to know everywhere they’ve been and with who. If ever there’s a situation she’s uncomfortable in, she need only slip through a mirror to somewhere else.

But Ophelia can’t live this life forever. Her days are numbered until she’ll leave Anima and go to a place too far away to travel by mirror, where she’ll meet her fiance for the first time.

A Winter’s Promise by Christelle Dabos was originally published in 2013 in French but was more recently (in October 2018) translated by Hidegarde Serle and published in English.

And I’m so glad it was.

I thought, going into this book, that it would be like Alice in Wonderland meets a Victorian, never-met-my-betrothed-but-we’re-getting-married-anyways story. But this story is unlike almost anything else I’ve ever read.

Ophelia is a classically quirky character that I thoroughly enjoyed following. She’s even more enjoyable to follow when we quickly learn that basically none of the other characters in the book are likable. In fact, they’re pretty much all completely detestable. I love me some villainous and morally grey characters, so I was more than ok with this turn of events.

These terrible characters (in a good way) were fascinating to read about and fun to root against, especially because they each have a special reason for us to hate them. They’re uniquely bad. Dabos does a wonderful job of creating backstories and slowly revealing them throughout the book, which explains why the characters are so horrible. Usually, once a reader understands where a villain’s villainy comes from, they don’t seem so bad. But somehow, Dabos allows us to know why they’re so awful without going soft on them.

The plot isn’t as straightforward as it would seem, either. Any time that I thought I expected what was about to happen, it surprised me. There ends up being an overall conflict that will more than likely continue into the next book, and perhaps the entire series, but there were also many other conflicts to spice things up and keep it interesting. I couldn’t help but keep reading as twist after turn cropped up.

My only qualm with A Winter’s Promise was the romance. Usually, I’m down for a romance, and I more or less expect it in most stories, but I really wished this one didn’t exist. The rest of the story is so unique, but this fell into too much of a trope, which for me, detracted from the story. It also didn’t seem believable. All of a sudden, one character realizes ‘oh my gosh, they must be in love with me!’ Meanwhile, I had never thought that for an instant. At first, I thought the character was just being too paranoid about it, and that it wasn’t actually true. It seemed forced to say the least.

“One can love at first sight. Indeed, one can never love someone more than when one knows the least about them.”

The highlight of A Winter’s Promise, by far, is the setting. The world is split into Arks, which float in the sky, each with completely different cultures, customs, politics, and powers. We get a small view into Ophelia’s home Ark, Anima, before she’s whisked to her fiance’s home Ark, the Pole. A lot of the story is focused on her learning about the Pole and its people after being thrust into a place she knows nothing about. The worlds are like nothing I’ve ever read before and I loved how Dabos interwove classic fantasy elements into a fresh story.I also loved learning about the Pole with Ophelia and discovering all its oddities. I hope that in the three books to come we get more of these Arks. The setting is so interesting, I almost wish the story were just about Ophelia hopping from Ark to Ark, learning about them all. I just can’t get enough of the world-building!

I also can’t help mentioning how the setting is displayed on this gorgeous cover. If you judge books by their covers this would be #1, and I can’t wait to see the covers in the rest of the series. The cover of Book 2, The Missing of Clairdelune, has been revealed and is stunning. I can’t wait to get my hands on it May 7, 2019! Especially with the cliffhanger ending in A Winter’s Promise and the mysterious and suggestive nature of the Fragment and Postscript which bookend the story but have not yet been fully addressed.

I loved a lot and disliked very little in A Winter’s Promise, granting it a 4.5 out of 5 stars in my book. I’d highly suggest the book to fans of The Chronicles of Narnia, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, or those who like the misfortune in A Series of Unfortunate Events. Although, to be honest, I found this book difficult to base recommendations on, since it’s quite unique.