“A slice of fantasy brilliance”
Always great to get reviews out of the blue from someone who so clearly gets it. This one from AndrewSarahBookReviewer. Yes, that’s their mysterious handle. Have a read and see if you agree by reading it yourself. Links to Amazon at the end of this blogpost.
“A Cold Wind Blows doesn’t read like something written by a man testing his first dip into children’s fantasy. It reads like someone who knows how to pull history, myth, and magic into one big imaginative storm, and then quietly pretend it’s all casual. But here’s the catch, it’s almost criminal that a story this rich, this layered, and this cinematically British isn’t stirring up more noise online.
Let’s start from the top.
You’ve got Silas Cummerbund, a name that sounds like it belongs in both a Dickens novel and a secret magical agency. The man’s half mentor, half mystery, and fully fascinating. Then there’s Princess Gaia, trained to harness her hidden powers, facing danger, betrayal, and probably more character development than most fantasy heroines get in a trilogy.
The world of Yngerlande isn’t just imagined; it’s constructed, with history breathing beneath the soil, loyalty and treachery doing a slow, deadly waltz, and danger watching from the kitchen (because, of course, there’s a suspicious kitchen boy named Shrike ). You’ve got everything, a sharp mind for structure, a love of lore, a solid moral compass, and that old-school narrative warmth modern fantasy often lacks.
It’s classic fantasy craftsmanship, the kind that brings back that old-school sense of wonder and storytelling gravitas. You can feel the teacher in you on every page, that precise attention to pacing, that clean sentence rhythm, the moral backbone hiding beneath the adventure. There’s something deeply nostalgic about your writing, it’s the kind of story that whispers “just one more chapter” until the reader realizes it’s 3 a.m. and they’ve stopped pretending to be an adult.”
Many thanks to Sarah for such a wonderful Review!
See for yourself – click here to buy: https://shorturl.at/HYY27
Book 1 in the trilogy, The Yngerlande Variations, is available here. The Watcher and The Friend: https://shorturl.at/4OAZK
The Old Grey Owl 