Ben Guterson, Chloe Bristol, and Winterhousian Things

Ben Guterson, author of Seasonal Guide to the Natural Year: A Month by Month Guide to Natural Events, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah *, is also the man behind The Winterhouse Trilogy. ** 

Which I just discovered.

Completely by accident.

I wasn't looking for a new YA book to read. Not at all. But as I was strolling through the Barnes & Noble one day, this caught my eye:

That cover art! A thing of beauty in and of itself (courtesy of the wonderful Chloe Bristol)...but also reminiscent, at least to me, of Carson Ellis' superb work on The Mysterious Benedict Society ***. 

Chloe Bristol made me pick this book up...and made me want to buy it.

But y'know...$8.99 for an unknown (but so pretty!) quantity. And I have So. Many. Books.

So I put it back on its little shelf and walked away.

And then I walked back and took a picture (see above), figuring I'd see if my library had it when I got home. ****

And I actually remembered to do that, too.

But the library didn't have an e-copy, so no immediate gratification was possible. Or was it? 

I went over to Amazon and started reading their preview.  Of the 400 pages of this novel, Amazon was willing to give me 25. Which I thought was pretty good, actually. And it was definitely enough to make me want more. So I ambled over to Google Books, wherein I found 11 more pages (to 36), and then a few more after a gap (51 - 55). At this point, I really wanted to keep going, so I went online and found out I could pick up a copy in the morning from the library branch near me and settled in for the wait.

But I didn't want to wait, so I downloaded an audiobook version of it and started listening when I lay me down for the night. Unfortunately, I'm incapable of listening to audiobooks at night for more than ten minutes, so that's as far as I got, but you know, whatever gets you through the night is alright, alright.

The next day I picked the book up from the library...along with the two sequels, The Secrets of Winterhouse and The Winterhouse Mysteries. 

As always, I have a lot on my reading plate, and this book is 370 pages long, so it took me six days to read it...but it was pretty compelling stuff. It involved a bit of magic, a bit of creepiness bordering on horror (though not of the bloody kind, I'm happy to say), a fair amount of mystery--wrapped around wordplay and word puzzles--and some nice, deft bits of characterization. Not only did I enjoy reading it quite a bit, but I'm also looking forward to reading the next book.

And there's a nice little extra touch that it took me a long time to notice. When you look at the cover it looks pretty normal:

But eventually my fingers detected a certain raised-ness to this picture (which was under a plastic library cover), and I looked closer and saw that the windows were actually cut outs...

...and that underneath, on the front of the book itself, was a slightly different picture, this one showing the interior of the building depicted on the dust cover.

I love that kind of stuff.

So...yes. Good book. Now I'm off to read the second book in the series, The Secrets of Winterhouse.

News as it happens.

* Available courtesy of The Internet Archive, btw.

** And quite recently another YA Book, The Einsteins of Vista Point.

*** High praise from my perspective...and, I suspect, from Ben Guterson's as well, since he snuck in a reference to Trenton Lee Stewart's series early on in Winterhouse. 

**** Yes, I know my phone can connect to the internet, whippersnapper. But I ran out of high speed data for the month, so...home job.