Bingo Squares:
- >!The Afterlife (HM) Extremely briefly at the very end, not a focus of the plot!<
- Older Protagonist
- Published in 2026 (HM)
- Murder Mystery (HM) Maybe:>!one of the 3 timelines is (mostly) about tracking down a supernatural serial killer. It's not much of a conventional mystery plot but it could perhaps count.!<
- Cat Squasher
The Red Winter lands pretty solidly as an 8/10 for me, which is impressive for a debut novel.
The Red Winter intrigued me early on with its framing device. The story unfolds as a kind of memoir narrated by Sebastian in 2013. There’s something immediately compelling about a narrator who is seemingly immortal, or at least impossibly long-lived, looking back across centuries. The footnotes and little meta touches, especially the references to Sebastian’s own books and the fake websites on which to purchase them, add a wonderful sense of texture and personality.
The narrative seems to gesture repeatedly toward the idea that Sebastian is monstrous or morally beyond redemption, yet what is actually shown on the page never convinced me of that framing. Instead of reading as a villain protagonist, Sebastian comes across as deeply human: flawed, emotionally driven, and capable of mistakes whose consequences extend far beyond what he could have anticipated.
Because of that, I found the “is Sebastian secretly terrible?” angle less effective than the tragedy that naturally emerges from his choices. The emotional core of the book, for me, is not in questioning whether he is evil, but in watching the accumulation of loss and regret settle around him. He doesn’t feel like a hero, but neither does he feel like a villain. He feels like a person caught in circumstances larger than himself, and that emotional realism is far more compelling than the attempted moral ambiguity.
I also think the structure works against this somewhat. The three-way split in the timeline didn’t fully land for me. I didn’t mind the fifteenth-century material being used as flashbacks but I found the interweaving of 1766 and 1785 less successful. I think the eighteenth-century portion would have been stronger told in chronological order, with the 1766 storyline unfolding first and then a clean time skip into 1785.
>!I also wanted to add Dayne’s death is a particularly impressive to me. Sullivan does an incredible job establishing her as something elemental and sacred with very little page time, making her corruption and death feel deeply tragic. Watching Sebastian kill her was one of the most painful moments in the book.!<
Antoine ended up affecting me more than I expected. >!His betrayal genuinely stung. It landed as a much sharper emotional beat than I was prepared for, and that sense of hurt hangs over the latter half of the novel beautifully. The looming question of what Sebastian did to betray Antoine creates a powerful tension, and when the ending finally arrives, it doesn’t resolve into something neat or morally satisfying.!<
>!What I found most striking about the ending was that it felt hollow in the most intentional, devastating way. Not hollow as in empty, but hollow in the way real grief often is. There isn’t a single clean reason for everything that went wrong. No one person alone could have stopped it, and yet everyone involved made choices that contributed to the disaster. Sebastian could have done better. So could Antoine. So could others.!< This is a story about love, consequence, and the unbearable weight of choices that can never be undone. It resists easy moral categories, and because of that, it feels painfully real.