I’m waiting for my book advent calendar to arrive from The English Bookshop (Swedish bookshops with English literature). I of course picked fantastika – ghost stories and fantasy to chill your bones. This advent calendar has become one of my traditions for December and I just love it so much. If you haven’t tried it I recommend you make a note for next year and order in the autumn.
The Winter Duke is a book from one of the previous years. My reading is not going very well this year but this brought back some reading joy. Ekata becomes Archduke after the rest of her large family is found to be in some sort of a coma. As she is not high up in the line of succession, Ekata lacks many of the skills and knowledge needed to navigate a court filled with political motives, intrigue and rules for how power is transferred.
What I liked is that Ekata wasn’t a hidden “chosen one”. This is absolutely a fantasy with all the elements that comes with it, but Ekata remained true to who she was and approached things that way – sometimes successfully and sometimes not. The world is interesting and unusual to me – set in a frozen landscape full of political intrigue with a secretive city in the icy water below.
This is a world that has queer characters (they/them pronouns, relationship between women) and their queerness is not a plot point. 🏳️🌈