Every good book is a door to somewhere else, don't you think? To open its covers is to open onto a landscape which you have not yet crossed and to feel yourself beckoned in. It might be an intellectual landscape - littered with strange formations of thought-rocks you have never encountered. It might be an emotional landscape - bathed in the colour of an unfamiliar sky. It might even be a spiritual one, animated by the sound of an unheard yet strangely familiar melody.
Open the covers of this book, and you might feel your eyes smarting from the bitter cold of a sharp and spectacular winter's day. Screw them up against the icy blast and you might catch sight of a beautiful mountain hare - ears pricked up and eyes looking back at you. This book will take you from mountain heights to urban jungle, and from the back of a cow shed to the slippery deck of an 18th Century sailing ship.
Let the rich vocabulary play with your senses as you consider 'the static scroll of winter's radio' or the role of the 'cloud-gatherer'. As with all the other three volumes in the is series, Melissa Harrison has gone out of her way to wedge the door of this book as wide open as she can, admitting poets, naturalists, young writers of whom you have never heard and old writers whom you had forgotten.
If you want an book to help reduce your heating bills this Winter, this could be it. The cosy effect of curling up with it will work wonders.
In all honesty, I have only one criticism to level at this series. It has taught me to appreciate the world in which I live and the seasonal colours it sports more than I would ever have thought possible. Regrettably, though - I am left with a problem. Could we not have another season so that there could be another book?
