A man with startlingly white hair and a very good suit stands outside a cell in a small-town jail in West Virginia. He holds up a card printed with twenty-four tiny numbers, shows it for about a second, and takes it away. Then he asks the girl inside to read it back. She is seventeen, a pageant queen who has spent one night on a park bench and two days on a cell cot, and she recites all twenty-four in order without hesitation, because she has never in her life forgotten anything she has seen. Winterveil by Ava Reid begins with that small, eerie test, and the rest of the novel is about what powerful adults do with a mind like hers.
Twenty-Four Numbers in a Jail Cell
The girl is Giselle Buckley, and she is one of four narrators.
The others arrive by similar routes. Julian Joyce-Young III, heir to an East Coast dynasty, won the Boston mayoralty at eighteen and was arrested months later. Klaudia Shimonova, born in Leningrad and raised in a Manhattan penthouse, made a fortune on the stock market at fifteen using her father’s forged signature, and then watched him press charges. Nadiya Karam, orphaned at nine, has grown up inside the school itself as the headmaster’s ward and its finest marksman.
In Winterveil by Ava Reid, each of them was offered the same bargain: prison, or Valeran.
The School Ava Reid Built
Valeran sits behind sixteen-foot walls in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and it exists because, in this version of history, the Cold War never ended. A reformist Soviet leader was assassinated in 1984, detente died with him, and fifty years on the two superpowers are still fighting through proxies while the newspapers warn of a third Red Scare.
What Reid builds on that foundation is a school run entirely on ranking. Students are scored every night on a public board, strategy is taught through full-sensory war simulations, and the headmaster rewards the top student with a weekend home. Nobody at Valeran eats lunch with friends if they could be studying instead. It is dark academia with the romance of old libraries stripped out and the competitive cruelty left in.
Between chapters, Reid slips in documents from the files: a newspaper piece on a teenage trading scandal, a pageant entry form, a school report card, a court transcript, a scientist’s resignation letter. They are brief, often funny, and quietly doing more worldbuilding than any of the narrators. A careful group will notice that several of them matter a great deal later.
Winterveil by Ava Reid also has a structural trick up its sleeve, and the halfway point is where a reading group will want to stop and compare notes. Nothing more will be said about it here, except that the book moves somewhere new and the rules change with it.
Four Ways to Be Useful to a Government
The strongest idea in the novel is that each of these four teenagers has been selected for a reason, and that none of them is told what it is.
Klaudia spends much of the book trying to work backwards from the clues, reading the others’ files and the literature connected to the code names they are given, which is exactly the right instinct and makes her the best company on the page. She is cold on purpose, a girl who concluded early that warmth was dangerous, and she explains her logic in the language of international relations theory: the security dilemma, relative gains, the prisoner’s dilemma and why cooperation beats betrayal once you stop trusting whoever is making the offer.
Around her, Winterveil by Ava Reid runs two romances. Giselle and Nadiya, who meet in that jail and grow closer through shared dreams that should not be possible, are the heart of the book. Julian and Klaudia circle each other like chess players, which is literally what they are.
Where Ava Reid Loses the Thread
Winterveil by Ava Reid is ambitious, and it pays for some of that ambition.
- The first hundred pages are slow. A lot of time goes on rankings and cafeteria seating before anything moves.
- The adults are cardboard. An enigmatic headmaster, a handler who speaks in riddles, a tech billionaire who mostly says “awesome”. None of them feels like a real threat.
- Julian’s gaze gets uncomfortable. His chapters return to Klaudia’s body with a frequency that the novel never seems to question.
- It breaks off. The final chapters scatter the four leads and end on an open wound. There is no resolution here, only a cliffhanger.
Questions Worth Arguing About
Start with the bargain. Every one of these teenagers was offered Valeran instead of prison, and every one of them said yes. Ask the group whether that was a choice at all, and whether an institution that recruits from the juvenile courts owes those children anything beyond a roof and a uniform. Then ask what the novel thinks the difference is between a student and a soldier.
Next, ask about gifts. Giselle’s memory, Klaudia’s strategic mind, Nadiya’s aim and Julian’s charm are all treated by the adults as resources to be extracted. Ask the table whether talent is ever safe in the hands of an institution that needs it, and whether any of the four ever gets to use what they are good at for themselves.
Finally, ask about coldness. Winterveil by Ava Reid gives its most sympathetic character a hard, remote shell and asks the reader to understand where it came from. Ask the group whether Klaudia’s coldness is armour, damage or strategy, and whether the book lets her set it down by the end.
For more in this vein, A Theory of Dreaming carries on her fascination with ambition and the institutions that feed on it, and Innamorata shows her gothic side at full strength. The Spy Coast by Tess Gerritsen is the choice for a table that wants intelligence work from the adult side, retired officers who know exactly what agencies do to their own. And Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo suits a group that wants another elite institution with something rotten underneath.
After the Last Page
The detail worth holding onto is a folded note.
Partway through the novel, cut off from each other and certain they are being overheard, the four need somewhere private to meet. Julian leaves a slip of paper on Klaudia’s pillow telling her which chess opening to play. It reads like flirtation to anyone who finds it. To Klaudia it is a set of map coordinates, because the notation for that opening can be read as a grid reference, and she solves it in about a minute. She should destroy it afterwards. She puts it in her pocket instead, and later finds it has followed her into a different set of clothes.
That note is what Winterveil by Ava Reid is really about: people who can only say what they mean in code, because everything they say is being recorded and everything they feel is a potential weakness. It is a clever, frustrating, unfinished book, and it will give a reading group plenty to decode. Just warn everyone at the table that the answer key is in book two.