Blog Tour: Road out of Winter by Alison Stine

Synopsis:

In an endless winter, she carries seeds of hope

Wylodine comes from a world of paranoia and poverty—her family grows marijuana illegally, and life has always been a battle. Now she’s been left behind to tend the crop alone. Then spring doesn’t return for the second year in a row, bringing unprecedented extreme winter.

With grow lights stashed in her truck and a pouch of precious seeds, she begins a journey, determined to start over away from Appalachian Ohio. But the icy roads and strangers hidden in the hills are treacherous. After a harrowing encounter with a violent cult, Wylodine and her small group of exiles become a target for its volatile leader. Because she has the most valuable skill in the climate chaos: she can make things grow.

Urgent and poignant, Road Out of Winter is a glimpse of an all-too-possible near future, with a chosen family forged in the face of dystopian collapse. With the gripping suspense of The Road and the lyricism of Station Eleven, Stine’s vision is of a changing world where an unexpected hero searches for a place hope might take root.

My Thoughts:

The world is at the brink of dying as winter stretches longer and longer. Wil's parents have left her alone on their marijuana farm, and all around her people are abandoning the Ohio small town for warmer cities. Wil decides to leave as well, with a small ragtag group of other young adults living on the edge of society. She wants to go to California, to be with her mother, but the chances of making it there seem slim.

Like all good dystopian fiction, there are cults and violent enclaves everywhere, and Wil and her friends escape one only to land in another. The landscape of frozen Appalachia was both chilling and realistic, and I respected Wil's unsentimental, anti-maudlin character. I also loved that there was zero romance here, besides fleeting memories of an old friend, and even that was in no way rose-colored.

I know that in the midst of a pandemic, it's sometimes hard to reach for a dystopian novel, especially when everything in real life seems pretty darn dystopian. Is Road Out of Winter worth reading? I really do think it is. While grim, this book shows us the strengths and weaknesses that exist in all of us. Wil's ability to grow plants, and nurture them through even the rockiest of beginnings, was a spark of hope running through the novel.