Imagine if the springtime weather you were expecting, never arrived. People might be inclined to chalk it up to winter not letting go. But when the warmth of summer comes, you will still be able to plant your vegetable garden, watch the trees and flowers bloom, and enjoy the long, hot days. Except, what if winter refused to loosen its icy grip? The food supply chain slowly breaking down when no one can farm, and animals can't be fed. Not just in New York or Niagara Falls, but everywhere across the globe. No heating fuels, no gasoline, no delivery trucks with needed food and supplies. How long would it take for society as we know it to break down?
This is the state of the world when we meet Wylodine(Wil). Alone on an Appalachian farm in Ohio, her family had fled to California, leaving Wil to keep their marijuana farm running and make do anyway she can. She has always been a loner, an outsider, but when conditions worsen, can she trust her new friends to help her reach her mother. Wil leaves the farm with some seeds, some grow lights, and as many supplies as possible. Have her life experiences prepared her for what lies ahead?
It is a difficult story to explain. There are all the things I think we have been conditioned to expect if chaos ruled the world. Thanks to all the zombie and horror movies and books, we know that people will be evil, people will have selfish agendas, people will take and give nothing in return. In addition to surviving other people, Wil will have to face the relentless cold. Her determination adds an interesting dynamic to what could have been a rather bleak tale, and she is nothing if not a survivor.
The Road Out of Winter happened to be the next book on my TBR list, and we in New York are experiencing another heatwave. I should be at the beach, but hello global pandemic, and I thought this would be the perfect way to escape from life in quarantine. Imagine thinking a dystopian novel would be the way to leave reality behind for a little while! Wil's reminiscing about her sad before life, combined with the realities of her now, kept me reading until the last page. At only 320 pages, it is an unusual way to tell a tale, and I would have liked a little more now, and a little less then.

I loved the idea of this book, but the execution of it wasn't always my favorite. It felt depressing, at times, mostly just from the grueling survival setting in the harsh world. I don't love the way it ended, I could have used MORE there...and less in the middle where things sometimes felt a smidgen monotonous. There were frequent flashbacks that sometimes slowed down the pacing, for me, and occasionally made it a bit hard to keep track of the back and forth with the present. I did love the found-family aspect of the story, though.

Stine does a great job setting up the dystopian world of an Ohio holler where the protagonist, Wylodine (Wil for short), lives with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, Lobo. The family lives with constant paranoia that their marijuana-growing operation will be shut down by the police. It is their major source of income in a poverty-stricken area of the country. As if that setting wasn’t bleak enough, due to some unspoken catastrophic world weather event, winter sets in. When spring doesn’t return for the second year, things start getting really bleak. Wil’s mother and Lobo leave her to care for the crop on her own while they head to California for a fresh start.

Eventually, Wil puts the grow lights in her truck and, pulling a travel trailer, sets out to follow her mother. She carries with her a leather pouch filled with seeds—her hope for the future. Along the way, she picks up strangers and forms a family of sorts with them. The people they encounter along the way are desperate for warmth and food. Some retain a faith that the world will right itself while others form cult-like groups waiting for the rapture.

Road Out of Winter is a near future that is possible enough to be genuinely frightening. Yet Wil and her “family” retain hope. The book is well-written and well-thought out. The ending is a bit abrupt, as though a sequel will be coming, but Wil does achieve some closure at the end.

I was misled by the cover copy. If it had more accurately described this book's tone, I don't believe I would have picked it up in the first place. I kept reading out of a combination of insomnia and anxiety rather than any real interest in the story or connection to the characters.

When I don't care for a book, I typically try to determine who I think that book might be for, if not for me. And I'm really struggling here. The speculative element is not nearly as prominent as the copy suggests, especially with regard to Wil's power to grow things. It's not exciting enough to be a thriller, as the cover art might want you to believe. It's mostly several hundred pages of how much life sucks in a sad little Ohio coal country town, and how that gets even worse in a climate disaster. I found nothing hopeful about it at all; I also felt the cover copy desperately misled me there. This book is unrelentingly bleak. There is no balancing levity, no glimmer of optimism. The characters are not dynamic; they are reactionary and, ultimately, disappointing. The band of characters you believe are being brought together to help and support each other utterly subverts that expectation.

The writing is, I suppose, at least vivid, in that it certainly evokes a sense of depression, dismal failure in both the past and present, a certainty that selfishness is humanity's defining trait, and trudging resignation to fate. If you enjoy that sort of thing, you'll probably enjoy this. I feel it could have been a more powerful short story than a novel.

Well I picked up this galley in the wee hours of the night because I could not sleep. A mistake because I did not go back to sleep! Creepy atmospheric novel about an almost apocalyptic timeline. With a winter that will not relent, in a derelict holler, abandoned by her mother, our heroine decides to leave her families marijuana farm and drive to California. Along the way she picks up other people desperate to survive. This story chronicles their battle against nature and a mankind that has turned on one another. Sadly, a little reminiscent of our current times.

This will be a fantastic cold weather read! I enjoyed it very much.

Weather can have strange impacts on people's behavior, with the extreme winter driving people toward desperation in Alison Stine's Road Out of Winter.

 Wylodine has lived her life mostly apart from the rest of her Appalachian Ohio community as her family lived on a relatively remote farm growing marijuana. Her mother and stepfather have left for the warmer clime in California before the harshest intrusion of the increasing winter weather, leaving Wil to fend for herself and maintain the farm to the best of her growing ability. Making the life-altering decision to head west toward her mother, Wil packs up the precious grow lights, the money buried in the yard, and hitches her tiny home to the truck to begin her journey. Joined along the way by others looking to escape their dire situations for the dream of something better (and warmer), Wil and her small. newly adopted family encounter dangers from the weather, the perpetual search for nearly nonexistent supplies, and threats from strangers lurking in the hills.

In a possible near-future, the extremes in weather have changed the world, and with it, society; the way this incredibly relevant concept is explored in this narrative through the perspective of a young woman who previously functioned on the fringes of her community offers interesting insight into the state of the world. Though there are smaller, impactful events that take place throughout their journey, their progress feels quite slow and even stunted, without providing more extensive development in the characters or world that would balance that stagnation out; as an example, we know that Wil is a young woman over 18, but her age, and that of those around her, doesn't feel quite defined, particularly when she oscillates calls the guys in her adopted family men and boys. With survival on the line, the idea of hope sprouting despite circumstances and from innocuous origins is well explored throughout the text.

Overall, I'd give it a 3.5 out of 5 stars.

This is set in a seemingly plausible future, and it is mostly engaging. It's starts a little slow but builds nicely. The author writes quite well and also created an interesting main character. This is a pretty solid scifi read.

Thanks very much for the ARC for review!!

A solid entry for the climate change / dystopia bookshelf. Well-written. But, honestly, there are a lot of these types of books out right now and they do all seem to blend a bit and elements of one are found in another.

In the not so distant future, winter lasts a long time. For Wylodine, whose family makes a living growing marijuana, things are even more difficult then ever as she’s left to tend the crop on her own. And now for the second year in a row, spring has failed to appear, so Willodyn decides to start her life over somewhere warmer. With the seeds for her plants staches in her truck, she begins a hazardous journey where the weather is the least of her worries. People have become the ultimate enemy in a world with no rules, no compassion and no justice. This books is all the more frightening because it seems all to plausible in a world run by mad dictators who refuse to acknowledge science and stalked by unknown illnesses with no known cure