 Hi there. Today on Typical Books, I'm going to talk about Voices in the Snow by Darcy Coates. So yeah, it is a typical book. The back and the front don't necessarily match, although they do have this kind of delicate, almost sugar-spun snow look to them. And I want to draw attention to the cover in that there are several covers available for this. One looks kind of YA, Harry Potter-ish. One looks decidedly horror in keeping with the rest of Darcy Coates books and a look that we've come to expect and trust. This sort of looks like a contemporary thriller. They've got almost like a girl on the train sort of look to it or something. I'm not really sure, but this is what was available in Canada. So it could be a regional thing, let alone just design decisions or different publishers. I don't know what's going on with the covers. But I mean, I don't know what's going on with my own covers. This is the second last cover. There's a new cover for Night Face Out. I haven't been shipped the proofs yet, which I will. I have some on the way, but the new cover will be unleashed soon. This is the temporary cover when I have the rights reverted to me. So this is now independently published before that there was a cover which I don't have the cover of that had a vampire mouth of blood, a really kind of sexy vampire looking cover. This was the more artsy cover that we had come up with after we decided to change it from the first cover, which was this wonderful beast you see before you. But hey, I mean, those are the trials and tribulations of small press publishing, I suppose. So I'm no stranger to having different covers for different reasons. I just don't really know why this has different covers and it's a brand new book. It's there's something, you know, you can understand about having different covers for books in different markets after it's been out a while. But upon its initial release, it I always thought there was just one vision for the book, right? And that was what was used. I know sometimes there's differences in Canadian and UK covers. Nosferatu by Joe Hill had a whole different title. So I can understand that to a certain extent. But I don't think this has many different publishers. But I don't know. I'm an expert. What I do know is that I enjoyed it very, very much. Now I live in Canada. It is balmy here, a balmy 25 degrees Celsius. I don't know what that is in Fahrenheit. I do have Fahrenheit on my phone for my American husband's benefit so that we can sort of speak the same language from time to time. But I also it just stops knowing here a week ago. I have Reynolds phenomena, which is a circulatory problem, meaning that my hands, toes, nose, different extremities can turn colors. The worst is like a darkish blue. We're getting close to hypothermia a lot of times. In my case, when I'm shopping for groceries without gloves on in the produce section, let alone frozen. I rarely buy frozen just because I don't like touching it. But these are my mittens. So I mean, I have a certain love, hate relationship with winter, let alone these massive beasts that make a tremendous sound. That's insane. They're insane. You can't drive in these. I have boots that come up to my knees that are as insulated as these insane things that you can't drive a car in either. So I've got sort of like when I read The Shining, when I watch The Thing and now when I read this series by Darcy Coates, I'm always going to have this like vision of me freezing to fucking death in the winter to put it bluntly. So it's only not been snowing here in Canada for a week. I hardly needed these this winter. Incidentally, it was kind of mild, but I have them to save my life. So a week after the snow has stopped here, the week after we had a little blizzard. So not just like a few flakes that melted before they hit the ground. I mean, like real snow. And then I picked this up. I felt kind of silly, but the story grabbed me right away. So the snow didn't matter. Claire meets Doran under the most wild circumstances. And normally when it comes to a story that starts out sort of like a girl meets boy, I run like I bolt, I barf, that is not for me. But this, like most of Darcy Coates books, is more of a girl meets house story. And although we shouldn't rubble in the architecture quite like so many people do when they they're writing like a pseudo gothic. This house is fantastic. Winterborn, perfect name for a house that lives in this forest in the middle of Banksy Forest, in the middle of nowhere that has been snowed in. And it's such a wonderful setting. And I love it very much. I want to get to know these grounds. No one escapes the stillness. Claire remembers the cold. She remembers abandoned cars and children's toys littered across the road. She remembers dark shapes in the snow and a terror she can't explain and then nothing. When she wakes, aching and afraid in the stranger's gothic home, he tells her she was in an accident. He claims he saved her. Claire wants to leave, but a vicious snowstorm has blanketed the world in white, trapping them together. And there's nothing she can do but wait. At least the stranger seems kind. But Claire doesn't know if she can trust him. He promised they were alone here. But she sees and hears things that convince her something else is creeping about the surrounding woods, watching, waiting. Between the claustrophobic storm, the inescapable sense of being hunted, Claire is on edge and increasingly certain of one thing. Her car crash wasn't an accident. Something is waiting for her to step outside the fragile safety of the house, something monstrous, something unfeeling and something desperately hungry. Now, I am not going to go into any sort of spoilers outside of the fact that she is a shortwave radio enthusiast. I found that fantastic. My grandfather, I never met. My mother's side had a shortwave radio. My mother had turned it on several times. He had a couple in the house, but this one in particular we did get to play with. So I get the the kind of thrill of that. So aside from like it being in the winter, it being in this weird gothic home that gets snowed in and the surrounding by it started by pines and forest and all of those almost very Canadian things really got to me as something like, oh, wow, this is so up my alley. I enjoyed all of those aspects of it. So it detracted from this girl meets boy sort of thing. And Doron himself is extremely aloof, so he's not a typical boy. Now, driving through this force at the beginning, I've had an experience with driving a little car and texting a friend of mine and my sister and being like, OK, if I don't text you in a half hour, message me back and make sure I'm OK or call or if I don't call you at the midway point where I normally call you within this amount of time, because it was like snow furrows in the in the highway. And I'm following like this person's tail lights in front of me and I can hardly see them and my whippers are going like 100 miles an hour while I'm doing about four miles an hour. It was really, really, really rough. So I right off the hot really could see and envision this. It was written quite well in that sort of tension and the drive to drive through that sort of weather with a real reason. And the reason is kind of vague, but you get it. There's something wrong. She needs to go and pick up her aunt and drive to her sisters and there's miles in between this. It's snowed out. There's no one else on the road. The plows aren't running and everyone's kind of scared and on edge and saying that it's not safe to do this. And that's sort of where this begins, something that is you're already you're already feeling tension and it's done masterfully, actually. Then there's a car accident and it's an awkward accident in that when Claire wakes up, she is injured. But we get a glimpse of the accident itself and some of the things that she was doing beforehand. And it just doesn't sit well with you as the reader. And in a way, you're in the same position as Claire, where not only does she not remember any of it, you as the reader were privy to a little bit of things that she doesn't remember. And it still doesn't add up for you either. And I really thought that that was a really good tactic going into this book. The description of the forest is sort of enchanting in that it's not an old growth mystical forest necessarily where you can envision a lot of like horror or fantasy taking place. And I'm thinking like the black forest or a shored forest, those sorts of forests that are sort of that percolate when you're thinking of a forest in the middle of nowhere, where this Gothic mansion may be. It's a lot like the planned forestry and forest like arboretums and things like that, where all of the trees are in nice, neat rows. And I've always found those a little bit more creepy. So it's nice to see that used to its full extent. Not only does this logging road cut through this forest where most of it is lined and it's an old forest. So it's all in rows, but their trees are very, very big. So it's very dense, very dark and it cuts the wind and it cuts the snow. It probably cuts the noise. It's very, very large. So this road, even though it's very straight and very safe, is surrounded by a lot of nothing. And in the middle of this nothing is this mansion. The one thing that gets me about this mansion, aside from its size and it's it snowed in when we really get into the heart of this story. So we don't get a lot of chance to really see a lot of it because they're kind of shuffling through this this mansion, her and Doran, because they're stranded in it together and alone. Otherwise, they're shuffling through it and it's dark and it's cold. So they don't like really stop to explain a heck of a lot of it. But what we get to see is quite splendiferous and it's a wonderful place. Plus, it has an indoor wood furnace heated garden in the basement, which is fantastic. I come from a line of gardeners. I don't have a garden at the moment, but I like gardening. I'm a horticulturalist at heart, so I really like this. There's a few of my questions, though, as far as the plot goes and sort of a little bit of the research and things that don't add up entirely for me. There's only a few little, little tiny things in this that I'm sure if I would have scrutinized the passages that made me go, huh, I would have figured them out or to read back. But it's such a page turner that I just found myself kind of plowing through it, so to speak. No snow pun intended. I just went through and skipped over the things. I'm like, oh, I had a question about that, or did they do this? I should go back and look. No, forget it. I'll just keep going. Because someday I'll probably reread this. Now, I'm not a big series reader, but I'm excited for this because it is a book one in a planned series of more than four. Because there's four books, I think three are out now or three are announced and the fourth is on its way. I'm not sure, but it's the Black Winter series. This is book one. I've never really been into series necessarily. I read a lot of Harry Potter. That was a big one, of course. I got to about the fifth book and just gave up, but I made the mistake of reading them all back to back. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the Stig Larson series. I've read a lot of that, not the ones that weren't written by him. But I don't know of any other series that really speak to me. Peter Straub has some series that I've never really dipped into. And there's other loose series within horror, but nothing really necessarily is a multi book horror universe. So if there's one that's slipping my mind, aside from any of the Tim Underwood books, then let me know because I'm very curious if there's something that I've totally missed here. Now, I did apply the bookscorer to this. Huge thanks to Harpies and the Trees, as ever. And if you're interested in this book, she has done a review as well, which I'm going to sit down and watch in a minute because I put off reading a lot of reviews or watching a lot of reviews about this book because I wanted to read it for myself, sort of in my little cocoon. So now I'm going to go and see what other people had to say about it. But yeah, she also developed the bookscorer. So this scored a 95 out of a possible 114 in the bookscorer. So very close to 100, which is basically a five star book. This is 4.5 according to the score. I give it bonuses because not only did the book entice me to read a series that is not entirely existent yet, it really, really spoke to me considering I kind of hate the winter and I just got out of the winter and the winter stuff is the last thing I really wanted to read right now. But I liked it so much, you know, so I give it some bonuses for that. So I'd have to say it's a perfect five star read for me. I enjoyed it very, very much. I also did have, like, not a problem with the character development and they're not necessarily one dimensional. And some people would have probably more complaints with the aloof character within Doran and the little Lord Fauntelroy sort of thing going on there. He reminds me of the character from Black Butler in a lot of ways. But I know he grew on me. I like that. That wasn't the unrealistic thing to me. A little bit of what Claire had to do and say struck me as more unrealistic. But of course, the story carried so much for me. The plot, the story, the interactions, the architecture, the isolation, the the research in how the cold whips up in a believable manner. It's a super storm and it's almost a mythological, supernatural weather that they're dealing with that I liked a lot. Now, there are there is a twist very late in the novel, which doesn't seem so late coming because the the story really moves along. I liked it and I just want to leave it entirely for people to discover because the back of the jacket copy, if that doesn't entice you, then I don't know what will. Having the book spoiled for you might drag you in, but it's no fair to do any of that. Right. And it's a series. So I don't want to like I don't want to guess about things that I am waiting to read as well. Thank you very much for watching. I have a little special coming up at five hundred subscribers very soon, which is a little bit of a day in the life. And I'm excited to add that up. So if you have red voices in the snow or if you're a fan of horror series, which I realize there's not really a lot of or maybe I'm missing out on them, let me know in the comments. And of course, let me know what you're reading otherwise and have an oaky spooky day.