Book Review: The Winter Goddess by Megan Barnard

The Winter Goddess by Megan Barnard

Book title: The Winter Goddess
Author: Megan Barnard
Genre: Mythological retelling, historical fantasy
Published: March 11, 2025
304 pages
My rating: 3.5/5

“I don’t know how old I was, but a child still, and Danu and I had been walking through the deep parts of the forest, heading back to Tara. I was holding her hand and she was talking of this and that – Danu was always talking – when we crested the slope of a small hill, entering a clearing ringed with huge fir trees. I tilted my face up to see where they seemed to graze the sky and watched as something brushed the very tops of the branches – something white and gentle and mesmerizing. Snow, I somehow understood, though I had never seen it before.”

Cailleach, the goddess of winter, despises selfish and destructive humans. When her sacred grove is destroyed, she unleashes a brutal winter, killing hundreds of people. As a punishment, her mother Danu, the queen of the gods, sends her to live on earth among the people she disdains until she understands what it’s like to be a mortal.

The Winter Goddess is Megan Barnard’s historical fantasy inspired by Gaelic mythology. The concept was fascinating, and I wanted to like this book, but it let me down. For the longest time, I could not figure out what the book was trying to say. It felt that it either had the wrong main character or was telling the story in the wrong way.

It seemed that this should have rather been Danu’s story. She doesn’t accept her daughter as she is (she wants Cailleach to love spring like she does rather than be drawn to cold and winter – considering that Cailleach later has bisexual relationships with men and women, one might see here a parent’s inability to accept their child’s queerness). She supposedly loves mortals but doesn’t respect them and sees them as playthings. She thus has more to learn than Cailleach.

Part of the problem is that what Cailleach does to deserve her punishment is not shown. We are told that she unleashes a harsh winter, but how is that such a bad thing? We only learn later that people died due to the cold. Cailleach herself doesn’t witness this, and both her and we are removed from the event. As a result, the punishment seems disproportionate to her offence. Having Cailleach witness the destruction she causes would have made the punishment more understandable and the story more immersive. It’s also never quite clear what Danu wants her daughter to learn during her lives as a mortal.

Cailleach feelings toward people waver throughout the book. At first, she is indifferent toward them, but later she learns to like them – until she begins to despise them when her best friend dies in childbirth after a forced marriage. All in all, Cailleach’s dislike of people seems justified: she is right in considering them cruel and destructive. Their cruelty and destructiveness don’t end there, as Cailleach herself experiences. Because of this, it doesn’t really make sense why Cailleach in the end comes to appreciate people, and it also means that Cailleach’s character development mostly happens toward the end of the book.

The back cover text claims that a major thing Cailleach learns among people is “a long-buried secret that will redefine what it means to be god.” However, she only learns this secret toward the end of the book, and although it plays an important role in the final clash between Cailleach and Danu, it feels like an afterthought. Usually the things mentioned in the back cover blurb happen during the first third or at least during the first half, so that implies the book has major structural issues – as do the slow character development and the uncertainty as to where the story is heading. That being said, the ending did somewhat compensate for the weaknesses of the story.

Since the book is based on Gaelic mythology and the minor characters worship the old Irish gods, the book seems to be set in pre-Christian Ireland. The religion and druids the book describes, however, appear very Christian. There is a lot of talk about individual belief in gods, which sounds more Christian than any ancient religion that I know of. The world building doesn’t feel accurately historical either with a whole host of things that feel anachronistic – although my knowledge is so limited that the only concrete anachronism I can mention is one person smoking a pipe.

All in all, I found this book a rather frustrating read, and difficult to rate. I decided to give it three and a half stars. The Winter Goddess is a beautiful but rather simple and repetitive historical fantasy. If you like quieter, character-focused stories, you may enjoy this.