Red Winter by Anneli Furmark translated by Hanna Strömberg)

We’re on the home stretch of 2021. My original plan for this month was to only read Christmas/winter books, but I got distracted in the library so now we have a little mix. We’ll have 7 reviews (including this one) by the end of the year. We got two a week missing out the week of Christmas, then onto a plan I was going to do this year. I’ll explain during the 2021 year in reviews.

            Red Winter by Anneli Furmark (translated by Hanna Strömberg) is, at its core, a love story. Winter has set in for Sweden in the 1970s, and married mother of three, Siv, falls for young communist, Ulrik. Everyone hopes to remain in control of the situation, but everything could so easily come apart at the seams.

            I love watercolour styles in graphic novels and comic books, especially for winter scenes. Soft blues work so well in this style, and Furmark’s little dashes of warm oranges are frankly divine.

            I love that this book is so…so… normal, I suppose. I wanted to say mundane, but that feels like calling it dull, which blatantly isn’t true. I don’t know what I was expecting when I went into this book, but I think this is wonderful. Furmark brings huge political ideas right down to the human level, and when people do that well, it always manages to win me over.

            The homely nature of this book is so inviting, even in the darker moments. I’ll be back to this in the future, I’m sure of it because it’s a genuinely beautiful book that I wholeheartedly recommend. I found it at Burnley Library, and you can too.