Suspiciously Specific #13: Cozy Wintery Comfort-reads for long Winter Nights...
- The Fiction Fox
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
Genre: cozy fantasy Pagecount: 374 pages
Comfort-factor: cottagecore cozy fantasy with a snowy setting
Terlu Perna broke the law because she was lonely. She cast a spell and created a magically sentient spider plant. As punishment, she was turned into a wooden statue and tucked away into an alcove in the North Reading Room of the Great Library of Alyssium. This should have been the end of her story . . . Yet, one day, Terlu awakes in the cold of winter on a nearly-deserted island full of hundreds of magical greenhouses. She's starving and freezing, and the only other human on the island is a grumpy gardener. To her surprise, he offers Terlu a place to sleep, clean clothes and freshly baked honey cakes - at least until she's ready to sail home.
But Terlu can't return home and doesn't want to - the greenhouses are a dream come true, each more wondrous than the next. When she learns that the magic that sustains them is failing - causing the death of everything within them - Terlu knows she must help. Even if that means breaking the law again.
Genre: fantasy, middle-grade/YA
Pagecount: 400 pages
Comfort-factor: wintery setting meets comming of age and an ultimate ache of childhood nostalgia... I love to reread this every now and then in winter.
When Lyra's friend Roger disappears, she and her dæmon, Pantalaimon, determine to find him.
The ensuing quest leads them to the bleak splendour of the North, where armoured bears rule the ice and witch-queens fly through the frozen skies - and where a team of scientists is conducting experiments too horrible to be spoken about.
Lyra overcomes these strange terrors, only to find something yet more perilous waiting for her - something with consequences which may even reach beyond the Northern Lights...
Genre: fantasy
Pagecount: 319 pages
Comfort-factor: Reads like an Eastern-European folk-tale told by candlelight. Set against the snowy landscape of Rusland in winter.
At the edge of the Russian wilderness, winter lasts most of the year and the snowdrifts grow taller than houses. But Vasilisa doesn't mind—she spends the winter nights huddled around the embers of a fire with her beloved siblings, listening to her nurse's fairy tales. Above all, she loves the chilling story of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon, who appears in the frigid night to claim unwary souls. Wise Russians fear him, her nurse says, and honor the spirits of house and yard and forest that protect their homes from evil.
After Vasilisa's mother dies, her father goes to Moscow and brings home a new wife. Fiercely devout, city-bred, Vasilisa's new stepmother forbids her family from honoring the household spirits. The family acquiesces, but Vasilisa is frightened, sensing that more hinges upon their rituals than anyone knows.
As danger circles, Vasilisa must defy even the people she loves and call on dangerous gifts she has long concealed—this, in order to protect her family from a threat that seems to have stepped from her nurse's most frightening tales.
Genre: fantasy
Pagecount: 338 pages
Comfort-factor: another midwinter-tale that feels like one of the original dark fairytale told around winter-solstice, by the dim candlefire. This one is even more dark, more witchy, and more feminist in tone.
Lux has lost everything when Else finds her, alone in the woods. Her family, her lover, her home - all burned. The world is suspicious of women like her. But Lux is cunning; she knows how to exploit people's expectations, how to blend into the background. And she knows a lot about poisons.
Else has not found Lux by accident. She needs her help to seek revenge against the man who wronged her, and together they pursue him north. But on their hunt they will uncover dark secrets that entangle them with dangerous adversaries.
Genre: (cozy) fantasy
Pagecount: 317 pages
Comfort-factor: cozy fantasy, fairy-magic and an academic-rivals-to-lovers- romance set against a frosty northern landscape.
A prickly young professor in the field of dryadology (the study of Faeries), a meticulous researcher and a genius in her field - Emily Wilde has devoted herself to the creation of the first encyclopaedia of faerie lore. If her studies require it, she is more than willing to do field-research, and interact with the Folk themselves, even if that means some human interaction in the process as well. Something Emily has never excelled in.
When her field-expedition into an elusive species of faeries in the Scandinavian woods is rudely interrupted by the arrival of her academic rival Wendell Bambleby, Emily falls into an adventure like never before. One that will require not only the use of her head, but also her heart.
Genre: murder mystery, classic
Pagecount: 274 pages
Comfort-factor: classic closed-room mystery that takes place in a snowed-in train. You can't call it "cliché", when it's penned by the author who literally set the standard for said cliché.
Just after midnight, a snowdrift stops the famous Orient Express in its tracks as it travels through the mountainous Balkans. The luxurious train is surprisingly full for the time of the year but, by the morning, it is one passenger fewer. An American tycoon lies dead in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times, his door locked from the inside. One of the passengers is none other than detective Hercule Poirot. On vacation.
Isolated and with a killer on board, Poirot must identify the murderer—in case he or she decides to strike again.
Genre: young adult contemporary
Pagecount: 236 pages
Comfort-factor: the definition of comfort: a novel set in a snowed-in campus-dorm that shows how you can learn to refind friendship, love and support in the face of grief and loneliness. Pack the tissues!
Marin hasn’t spoken to anyone from her old life since the day she left everything behind. No one knows the truth about those final weeks. Not even her best friend, Mabel. But even thousands of miles away from the California coast, at college in New York, Marin still feels the pull of the life and tragedy she’s tried to outrun. Now, months later, alone in an emptied dorm for winter break, Marin waits. Mabel is coming to visit, and Marin will be forced to face everything that’s been left unsaid and finally confront the loneliness that has made a home in her heart.
Genre: literary fiction, novella
Pagecount: 127 pages
Comfort-factor: Small-time Christmas setting, featuring a story that's both comfortingly familiar and achingly sad.
It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.
Snow Falling on Cedars - David Gutterson Genre: literary fiction
Pagecount: 460 pages
Comfort-factor: Court-room drama, meets snowy atmosphere in a tight-knit small-town community. It might be the cover, the title, or the fact that I actually read this book whilst snowed in during a particularly harsh Dutch winter-week. This book completely transported me into its tight-knit community and offered the perfect mix of immersion, emotional weight and courtroom intrigue.
In 1954 on the isolated San Piedro Island, a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder. In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than a man's guilt. For on San Pedro, memories of a charmed love affair between a white boy and the Japanese girl who grew up to become Kabuo's wife; memories of land desired, paid for, and lost. Above all, San Piedro is haunted by the memory of what happened to its Japanese residents during World War II, when an entire community was sent into exile while its neighbors watched.
Genre: Historical Fiction, Magical realism
Pagecount: 464 pages
Comfort-factor: another mid-winter historical fantasy, but this time it's set in England on the banks of the river Thames.
On a dark midwinter’s night in an ancient inn on the river Thames, an extraordinary event takes place. The regulars are telling stories to while away the dark hours, when the door bursts open on a grievously wounded stranger. In his arms is the lifeless body of a small child. Hours later, the girl stirs, takes a breath and returns to life. Is it a miracle? Is it magic? Or can science provide an explanation? These questions have many answers, some of them quite dark indeed
Genre: middle-grade, historical fantasy Pagecount: 336 pages Comfortfactor: a magical winter-landscape and animal-companionship, with bonuspoints for the gorgeous illustrations.
Feodora and her mother live in the snowbound woods of Russia, in a house full of food and fireplaces. Ten minutes away, in a ruined chapel, lives a pack of wolves. Feodora's mother is a wolf wilder, and Feo is a wolf wilder in training. A wolf wilder is the opposite of an animal tamer: it is a person who teaches tamed animals to fend for themselves, and to fight and to run, and to be wary of humans.
When the murderous hostility of the Russian Army threatens her very existence, Feo is left with no option but to go on the run. What follows is a story of revolution and adventure, about standing up for the things you love and fighting back. And, of course, wolves.
Genre: fantasy
Pagecount: 506 pages Comfort-factor: a circus that shows up unexpectedly at night and transports you to a realm of magical competitions and rivaling illusionists.
The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.
But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands.
True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus performers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead.
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