Winterveil: A Guest Post by Ava Reid

Ava Reid, author of A Study in Drowning and A Theory of Dreaming, returns with a thrilling new story, Winterveil. Four powerful teens armed with secrets embark on a mysterious mission in an alternate future where the Cold War rages on. Read on for an exclusive essay from Ava Reid on writing Winterveil.  

I like to say that writing Winterveil involved both the most and the least amount of research I have ever done for a book.

The seeds of the idea for Winterveil first came to me when I was a eighteen, in my first year of undergrad—the same year that I became captivated by the political science classes I had just begun taking. While I had initially planned to pursue a degree in either English or journalism, I swiftly switched my focus to poli sci, and specifically to international relations.

Winterveil grew alongside my studies, two plants intertwining as they stretched toward the sun. I was particularly interested in the theory of realism, a philosophy that understands and analyzes the international political sphere as if it is one enormous board game, where the countries are the players and the game is zero-sum. Every loss is a win for your opponents and the stakes are the literally world-ending.

Another tenet of realism became a core theme of the book, and the central psychological tension of the characters. Realism holds that the state is the fundamental unit of analysis and that it should be regarded as a “black box”— only the external economic, political, and military actions are of significance, not the justifications behind them, nor any of the internal factors that may have brought them to be.

Out of this concept came the ambitious and publicly disgraced politician, the coldly brilliant strategist who views winning as survival and her intelligence as a weapon, the former pageant queen whose pretty face conceals darker desires, and the expert soldier who clings desperately to her framework of justice even as her own deeds begin to erode it.

None of the four protagonists are heroes. They are at the center of the world’s imperial core and are conscripted to do terrible things to maintain it. Yet they are all still young and vulnerable, and each coerced into their actions. Do their hesitations or inner doubts and turmoil matter? Can they justify what they have done? Can they ever be forgiven or absolved?

My aim with Winterveil is solely to ask these questions — not to answer them. In fact, I do not believe these questions have simple answers. But I do believe that they are worth considering, especially as reality edges ever-closer to the futures depicted in much dystopian literature. And so I am excited to welcome you to Valeran Academy, where nothing is as it seems and black-and-white morality is no more than a distant dream.