Welcome to a new year, my friends! Though the date has changed, we are still caught in the cold jaws of winter, so today I’m bringing you the Wondrous Winter booktag by the one and only Victoria Mann! I absolutely adore her channel, and she’s always creating bright, funny, and original content, and one of my favorite series of hers is the seasonal tags she creates! It started with her Awesome Autumn tag (which I did over on my YouTube channel) and I’m excited to be continuing her tags on my blog!
While the Awesome Autumn tag was based off of seasonal experiences, this tag is based off wintery movies. I’ve actually watched every single film on this list except for one (I wonder if y’all can guess which it is!), so I’ve been really looking forward to getting to this ever since my friend RC tagged me in his video. Let’s get started!
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Choose a book that you looked down upon until you realized what a fool you were!
We’re starting off with a bit of a silly pick, but this was kind of a difficult choice for me. I haven’t had many books I’ve looked down on that I can think of, but I will admit I have a bad habit of not appreciating middle grade as much as I should, which is the direction I decided to take this prompt in.
I’ve often made fun of myself for being into the Warriors series by Erin Hunter, at the ripe age of 20 years old. I only started reading these books when I was 18, due to many of my friends being horrified that I’d missed the mandatory middle school obsession with them. While these books are arguably ridiculous, there’s actually a deep lore to them and they were responsible for getting me out of my high school reading slump, which jumpstarted the journey that led me here!
I just started the second book in the fourth series, Fading Echoes, and I think it’s also about time I stopped being such a fool and started to appreciate these wild books and all they’ve done for me.
Frozen
Choose a book with your favorite sibling relationship!
Though books with good sibling relationships are few and far between now that I think about it, The Bone Witch by Rin Chupeco easily has my favorite! This book closely follows the relationship between the main character, Tea, and her older brother Fox, and their bond is integral to the plot.
As you might notice right on the cover, the tagline for The Bone Witch is ‘let me be clear, I never intended to raise my brother from his grave…’ which is a hell of a hook, and has haunted me ever since I first read it. The brother she raises is Fox, Tea’s favorite sibling. (I also have favorites, so no judgement there.) Her love for him raises him from the dead and jump-starts the plot after the whole incident reveals her to be a bone witch, which is not a very favorable occupation in her world.
However, as she grows into her power and suffers because of it, Fox is always by her side. He was honestly my favorite part of the book, and the only thing holding me back from finishing this series is knowing they’ll have a huge fight later. I just want them to be happy, dammit!
Frosty the SnowMan
What book did you experience coming to life in your head for the first time?
Since I’ve been reading since I was about two years old, it’s hard to pinpoint the exact first time I felt a book come to life, but My Mother’s Pearls by Catherine Myler Fruisen was probably one of the first ones. This is a cute picture book that was a gift from my own mother and follows a family heirloom as it’s passed down from mother to daughter over the years. When I was younger, the clothes were what came to life most for me, and it was fun to imagine myself in long, flowing dresses of other time periods.
Now that I see how much work goes into putting them on after finally getting a TikTok, I’m quite happy to live in jeans and t-shirts!
Cool Runnings
Choose a book where the characters are in a competition!
I love books with competitions so much (despite not being very competitive myself) that I couldn’t pick just one book for this prompt. A Song of Wraiths and Ruin by Roseanne A. Brown and Spin the Dawn by Elizabeth Lim are both books that perfectly fit this prompt! (And aren’t both of those covers just stunning?)
In A Song of Wraiths and Ruin, the competition runs through the entirety of the book by way of Solstasia, a competition held every 50 years to decide which god will rule over the next era. I loved reading about the festival and all the creative, intense trials the hero is put through. I especially loved how Karina and Malik’s attraction to each other grew with each challenge… even though they both needed to kill each other. 😈
Spin the Dawn, on the other hand, was exactly the vibe of Project Runway meets Mulan, down to the surprise twists halfway through challenges! While the fashion competition was most intense only in the first half of the book, I still thoroughly enjoyed them and demand more fantasy Project Runway books!
Home Alone
Choose a book you read that had no fandom and made you feel like you were Home Alone!
Due to spending a good portion of my reading time catching up on fandom favorites, it’s been a while since I’ve read a book I loved that felt like it had no fandom. However, The Wize Wize Beasts of the Wizarding Wizdoms by Nagabe was an absolutely adorable read that owns my whole heart and yet I have never seen anyone else mention it ever!
This manga is a small collection of short stories about a wide variety of couples falling in love, each with a unique scenario and pair of personalities. The art style is so soft and perfect for the fantastical world of the Wizdoms and the stories are a perfect balance of funny and heart-warming. And since opposites attract is one of my favorite tropes ever, and every single couple in this story has a different spin on it, I’ve reread it multiple times since I first bought it. It’s one of my favorites, and I really wish it had more love!
Happy Feet
Choose a book whose title was so misleading you now have trust issues!
Um, it ended. What gives?
Elf
Choose a book character who you think is a cotton-headed ninny muggin!
The entire Grishaverse series by Leigh Bardugo, though near and dear to my heart, is full of cotton-headed ninny muggins, but in my opinion the most cotton-headed of them all was Mal. Yeah, I’m marking my place in the Grishaverse Alina Love Interest fight a little early on this blog, but it needs to be said.
As a disclaimer, I was fully on the Alina/Nikolai train until King of Scars released and opened my eyes to the wonders of Zoyalai. Nikolai is still by far my favorite of the three men introduced as potential love interests in the original Grishaverse trilogy, but at this point, I still think there was a better ending for Alina than Mal and the orphanage. Sometimes I’m able to see some silver lining to her ending because I am still a huge sucker for childhood friends to lovers, but then I’m reminded of both “I am become a blade” and when Mal got pissed at Alina for moving on from him and finding a man after he dated girls in front of her for years. And had the audacity to use that cheesy “I didn’t even realize what was in front of me” line on her!
As an aside, I do slightly respect Mal’s existence on the grounds that it’s nice to see a teenage boy love interest act like a teenage boy in a YA novel. These days, YA fantasy tends to skew very mature and read as adult characters aged down, so it’s somewhat refreshing to see a dumb boy make dumb boy decisions, but a dumb boy must grow up eventually, and I never felt like he stopped being an idiot.
In conclusion, that Don’t Propose to your Girlfriend at Olive Garden on Valentine’s Day tweet is for men like Mal. I rest my case.
The Chronicles of Narnia
Choose a book with a character as self-sacrificing as Aslan!
As soon as I read this prompt, The Faithless Hawk by Margaret Owen jumped right into my head! This is the sequel to one of my favorite books, The Merciful Crow, and unfortunately revealing exactly which character fits this would be a huge spoiler. What I can say is that this was an amazing, immensely satisfying conclusion to the duology, and it’s rare that I get exactly what I want when it comes to an ending but Margaret Owen definitely delivered with this book. I’m super excited for her next book, Little Thieves, which is coming out later this year!
The Last Holiday
Choose a book that made you feel like you were going to die (of sadness, of boredom, of happiness, whatever!).
While I appreciate this prompt offering suggestions for which emotion to choose, The Foxhole Court by Nora Sakavic just straight up made me feel like I was going to die. If upon closing the book I heard a knock on the door and it was Andrew Minyard himself showing up to end my life, I would not have been surprised.
The Foxhole Court is not a book, but a journey. An emotional rollercoaster. If books are like video games where someone much better at playing the game has already made the choices for you, this is the equivalent of a speedrun. There is a point A and a point B and goddammit, those points are going to be connected no matter how many corners are cut and medical facts are ignored. Or just basic societal rules of human decency. As soon as the book opened with two full grown adults silently watching one kid clothesline another with a lacrosse stick in a locker room and just sweeping that shit under the rug, I began to wonder if there was going to be a height requirement for this ride.
(There is not, but there really should be one. This book straps you right into your seat with zero warning and I have never felt so many highs and lows and every possible flavor and variation of ‘what the fuck?!’ in so small a time span. Have I ever really recovered? No, and I don’t think there is any recovering. My life is just split into Before The Foxhole Court and After The Foxhole Court. I’ll see you all in therapy.)
Happiest Season
Choose a book with your favorite sapphic couple!
The Locked Tomb trilogy (third book releasing next year!!) by Tamsyn Muir easily has my favorite sapphic ship, sapphic couple, and just plain sapphics. Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth were easily two of my favorite reads from last year, and I’m in love with everything about them. All anyone needs to know about these books, in my opinion, is that the concept is “lesbian necromancers explore a haunted castle in space” and it DELIVERS. I am on the edge of my seat waiting for the third book, and Tamsyn Muir has also signed on to write 5 (five!!!!) more books with Tor! She is an incredibly fresh, hilarious voice in modern sci-fi, and if you need me I will be busy clearing off a shelf to dedicate to her.
But wait, you may ask, who is actually in your favorite sapphic couple, Iza? What a wonderful question! All I can say to answer is that I love Harrow and her girlfriend with my whole heart. Which girlfriend? Another great question. 🙂
One thing I especially love about Victoria’s tags is that she always comes up with a couple of neat bonus questions in addition to the regular prompts. If you don’t like any of the core prompts or they just don’t apply to you, you can swap them out with these bonus questions, or just leave them out, or try to be ambitious and answer them all! If you do this tag for yourself, the bonus questions are truly yours to do what you will with. In my case, I’m going to answer all of them, so let’s continue!
Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer
Choose a book you’d like to run over with a reindeer. Multiple, MULTIPLE, times.
Ah, Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan, my old sleep paralysis demon. It’s been too long since I tried to put this into a tag and failed, but let’s go again for old time’s sake.
I think my painful track record of attempting and failing to encapsulate why I hate this book so much is because I’ve always tried to verbally talk about it, and whenever I try to, I revert to an angry little beast incapable of speech or coherent thought. This book turns me into something else, and it’s been so hard to talk about why. I read this two years ago for the Asian Readathon, and it has been a poltergeist in my mind ever since. I will be upfront in that I knew exactly what I was getting into with this book, since the front flap conveniently has all the trigger warnings for you laid out in place of an actual synopsis. Maybe that should have been a red flag for me, because it turns out the trigger warnings are the synopsis.
I won’t get deep into it, because I can already feel my fingers locking up from rage, but this book is not good, and I don’t like to use that phrasing for many (if any) books. The first part of the book almost makes up for the rest of it, because I found the main character Dewi Ayu and her story before her daughters very compelling. I mean, how could you not when the first line of the book is her waking up from the grave after being dead for twenty-one years and then walking right on home? And then you get into her backstory! She took no shit, survived horrors, and kicked ass! But as soon as you hit about a third of the way through, any plot and coherency leaves and it just becomes the trigger warnings over and over again.
And you know what? Fine. Dark fiction, especially for books based on history, has its place. Portraying does not equal condoning, I know that. But then you get to the end and there was NO POINT. I put myself through so many gross, nauseating things and the theme doesn’t even make SENSE! Not to mention the ending just comes out of whatever is left of left field with, as far as I could tell, little to no foreshadowing. I will be finding this book a new home in the hands of someone who can make sense of it as soon as I stand to look at it again, and as soon as I get the hoofprints off the cover…
Rent
Choose a book that makes you want to SING! (any kind of strong emotion will do!)
On a much lighter note, a book that brings me incredible joy, enough to burst into song, is The Storm Crow by Kalyn Josephson! First of all, we should definitely have a musical about crows, so if I have to sing it all myself I will. This incredible YA Fantasy debut follows Anthia, a princess of the kingdom of Rhodaire, a country that relies on elemental crows (the coolest things ever) for their way of life. After her country is invaded and the crows are destroyed, Anthia incites a rebellion to get back what was taken from her.
What I really loved about this book (admittedly basically everything) was the great depression rep. Anthia struggles hard and battles against herself and her inner demons as much as her blood and flesh enemies, and it was so different and refreshing to see this portrayed in a fantasy setting! The details and worldbuilding was also fantastic, and though you get the most screentime in Rhodaire and Illucia, the enemy empire, I felt that every single country in their universe was built up. I’ve been meaning to get to the sequel for the longest time, and I really need to pull myself together and read it!
The Grinch Who Stole Christmas
Choose a book or book character that made you lose faith in humanity!
The fact that The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger is still taught and hailed as a classic despite having one of the most pretentious, insufferable protaganists of all time is what truly makes me lose my faith in humanity. I already am not a huge fan of the classics, but this takes it to a whole new level. Just looking at this cover makes me want to scroll up and use this instead for the running over with a reindeer prompt. As soon as there’s an overhaul of the classics taught in classrooms, this needs to be the first to go, and Faulkner can follow it right out.
Ice Age
Choose a book that turned you into Scrat with his acorn, obsessive to the point of concern!
I know I have a bad habit of not talking about my favorite books very much, to the point where I’m not sure many of my close friends even know what my favorite books are. If there’s one book I don’t know how to shut up about, though, it’s Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell. I swear I’ve held it up for ever book tag I’ve ever done, but I love it so much and it’s just so amazing that I don’t know how to stop! I’ve probably reread it five times, and if it wasn’t a graphic novel I would have tabbed and annotated the hell out of it by now.
The art style? Gorgeous. The cover? Stunning. The characters? Compelling. The friend group? Gay. The drama? Constant. The message? Wholesome and needed. Where did it hit? Too close to home! I would 100% accidentally start the end of the Ice Age for this book, and that is no exaggeration. Please consider checking it out if you haven’t already!
Anastasia
Choose a book (or even a scene from a book) that gives you Once Upon A December vibes!
For the final prompt, I can think of few books that fit this as well as The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden. This Russian historical fantasy swept me up into a whirlwind of snow and folklore, and it still lives in my mind rent-free a month after finishing it. I went in with high expectations and still had my mind blown.
Do I think my selection is influenced from having finished this in December? Perhaps. However, Anastasia is one of my cartoon comfort movies of questionable quality, and I’ve heard so many renditions of Once Upon a December over the years. Whether it’s the music box version, the original, the orchestral, or in some places even the punk rock version, I think there are many scenes that deserve to have some version of this song playing behind them when this book gets adapted. Not to mention, the first line is ‘dancing bears’! It fits perfectly!
Thank you very much for reading to the end of my post. I’d love to tag my friend Val over at ValWriteBooks to do this, but if you were inspired by these questions, feel free to do it yourself and show this tag some love! I dropped the questions at the end of the post to make it convenient, but they’re also in the description of Victoria’s original video, linked at the top. I hope you all enjoyed my responses, and hope to see you again in the next one!
❄️ WONDROUS WINTER BOOKTAG Questions ❄️
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: Choose a book that you looked down upon until you realized what a fool you were.
Frozen: Choose a book with your favorite sibling relationship.
Frosty the SnowMan: What book did you experience coming to life in your head for the first time?
Cool Runnings: Choose a book where the characters are in a competition.
Home Alone: Choose a book you read that had no fandom and made you feel like you were Home Alone.
Happy Feet: Choose a book whose title was so misleading you now have trust issues.
Elf: Choose a book character who you think is a Cotton-Headed Ninny Muggin!
Chronicles of Narnia: Choose a book with a character as self-sacrificing as Aslan.
The Last Holiday: Choose a book that made you feel like you were going to die (of sadness, of boredom, of happiness, whatever!).
Happiest Season: Choose a book with your favorite sapphic couple.
Bonus Questions!
Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer: Choose a book you’d like to run over with a reindeer. Multiple. MULTIPLE, times.
Rent: Choose a book that makes you want to SING! (any kind of strong emotion will do!)
The Grinch Who Stole Christmas: Choose a book or book character that made you lose faith in humanity.
Ice Age: Choose a book that turned you into Scrat with his acorn, obsessive to the point of concern.
Anastasia: Choose a book (or even a scene from a book) that gives you Once Upon A December vibes.
Ravens and Pages 
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