Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Way Past Winter is a snowbound quest for 10 year olds that starts with four children, one cabbage and a knock at the door.<\/p>\n
Winter arrived five years ago and never left. It stuck birds to branches. It caught rivers mid-splash. People stopped being able to picture green, apart from the silvery fir trees.<\/p>\n
Mila lives in a cabin in the forest with her two sisters and her brother Oskar. Their father walked out into the white five winters ago and never came home.<\/p>\n
The four of them are arguing about how to cook a cabbage when the dogs start barking.<\/p>\n
Outside is a man on a horse the size of a barn, wrapped in so much fur that he looks like a beast riding a beast. Behind him are a dozen boys on ponies, carrying torches. He wants food and somewhere to sleep. When Oskar says no, the man just keeps asking questions instead. How old are you. Where is your father. How many of you are there.<\/p>\n
Oskar answers all of them. Including their names.<\/p>\n
Here’s the bit that gets under your skin. When the man swings down off the horse, he doesn’t sink into the snow. He lands on it. Mila looks away, looks back, and now he’s in up to his calves like everyone else. Nobody remarks on it. It just sits there.<\/p>\n
By morning the men have gone and so has Oskar. The yard is smooth, as though nobody had ever stood in it. And Mila has a bruise round her wrist the colour of a thundercloud that she can’t account for.<\/p>\n
It reads like a folk tale that’s been passed along for a very long time. Short sentences. Old warnings about ice maidens who wait at the bottom of frozen lakes for children who wander off. Heat that has to be argued over, because there’s only so much firewood.<\/p>\n
If you’ve got a reader who likes their magic cold and a bit frightening rather than sparkly, this will suit them right down to the ground.<\/p>\n
One thing to weigh up first. The missing father is the ache underneath everything and it’s never softened. He walked into the snow and didn’t come back, and the sisters have an unspoken rule about not mentioning him. That’s set up in the first chapters rather than sprung later on. A child who worries about a parent leaving may feel that one keenly.<\/p>\n
The threat is menace rather than blood. Nothing violent happens on the page while all this is being set up. But the stranger is properly unsettling, and children do go missing.<\/p>\n
If that goes down well, The Wolf Wilder begins with soldiers shoving past a girl into her house in a Russian forest and dropping a dead elk on the sitting room rug.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Way Past Winter is a snowbound quest for 10 year olds that starts with four children, one cabbage and a knock at the door. Winter arrived five years ago and never left. It stuck birds to branches. It caught rivers mid-splash. People stopped being able to picture green, apart from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11049,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":9534,"lr_next_read_anchor":"The Wolf Wilder","lr_seo_hook":"Three sisters cross a frozen land to get their stolen brother back."},"book_tag":[22],"age_group":[29],"book_type":[1048],"book_author":[578],"class_list":["post-9510","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-mystery-books","age_group-books-for-10-year-olds","book_type-free","book_author-kiran-millwood-hargrave"],"yoast_title":"The Way Past Winter by Kiran Millwood Hargrave | Read free on Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"Three sisters cross a frozen land to get their stolen brother back. For ages 10+. Read this book free in the Little Reads app. 3,000+ books.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n