"The Barren Grounds" by David A. Robertson

I normally tend not to love stories that use "this book is made of [Insert Minority Here] culture!" as a selling point. Now, I have nothing against [Insert Minority Here] culture; it's just that [Insert Minority Here] culture is not usually a very good skeleton for a story. Or musculature, for that matter. Or skin. It's like tendons; it can be in there, and it can be important, but it shouldn't be the entire book. Unless you're very good at writing, or are writing nonfiction about that culture.

This book has those tendons. And also a bunch of other stuff. It was apparently somewhat inspired by Narnia, and I can definitely see that; it is about kids (just two this time) getting isekai'd, albeit through stapling a drawing to a wall rather than through all hiding in a closet, and it does involve an eternal winter and (sort of) has talking animals.

The kids are Morgan (the girl; the perpetually angry one) and Eli (the boy; the one who draws a lot, speaks Cree, and doesn't talk much). The animal people are Ochek (the bear-like one who's actually a fisher; I've seen pictures of actual fishers, and they are alternately adorable and terrifying) and Arik (the squirrel one, who seems to take great pleasure in sassing people. Sort of like real squirrels do.)

 

The picture of Arik is way too tiny, by the way. She's actually supposed to be like five feet tall, and I find it hard to believe that the picture is accurate if a simple analysis of scale suggests that it means Morgan is over eight feet.

Anyway, the plot revolves around this evil dude who stole the Birds That Make It To Where Summer Can Happen (not their actual name) and kept them in his house because... he wants to eat stuff? His logic is a bit questionable. So now it's always winter everywhere but in the evil dude's house and everyone but him is starving to death because it's always winter everywhere but in his house.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for scary stuff and some violence (there's a wolf that tries to eat people, and people get shot at with arrows).

4 stars. I liked it rather well, even though I was shipping Ochek and Arik and then |Ochek died|. I'm pretty sure that's the first time on this blog I've ever referred to "shipping" characters.

(Endnote: In this book's case, the [Insert Minority Here] culture is "vaguely Canadian Indigenous". I honestly thought it was Inuit or something similar for like a third of the book, though.)