The Winter Room is a short novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by Newbery Honor award winning author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 Gary Paulsen

Gary Paulsen

Gary James Paulsen is an American writer who writes many young adult coming of age stories about the wilderness. He is the author of more than 200 books , 200 magazine articles and short stories, and several plays, all primarily for young adults and teens.-Biography:Gary Paulsen was born in...

. It is a mythical

Mythology

The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...

 story about Viking

Viking

The term Viking is customarily used to refer to the Norse explorers, warriors, merchants, and pirates who raided, traded, explored and settled in wide areas of Europe, Asia and the North Atlantic islands from the late 8th to the mid-11th century.These Norsemen used their famed longships to...

s, elves

Elf

An elf is a being of Germanic mythology. The elves were originally thought of as a race of divine beings endowed with magical powers, which they use both for the benefit and the injury of mankind...

, but primarily logging

Logging

Logging is the cutting, skidding, on-site processing, and loading of trees or logs onto trucks.In forestry, the term logging is sometimes used in a narrow sense concerning the logistics of moving wood from the stump to somewhere outside the forest, usually a sawmill or a lumber yard...

, narrated in the first person

First-person narrative

First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...

 to two boys by their Norwegian uncle in the "winter room

Living room

A living room, also known as sitting room, lounge room or lounge , is a room for entertaining adult guests, reading, or other activities...

" of a farm

Farm

A farm is an area of land, or, for aquaculture, lake, river or sea, including various structures, devoted primarily to the practice of producing and managing food , fibres and, increasingly, fuel. It is the basic production facility in food production. Farms may be owned and operated by a single...

 in northern Minnesota

Minnesota

Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...

 (U.S.

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

). Like many of his works, it evokes a harsh rural

Rural

Rural areas or the country or countryside are areas that are not urbanized, though when large areas are described, country towns and smaller cities will be included. They have a low population density, and typically much of the land is devoted to agriculture...

 environment using vivid imagery, and has elements of a coming of age

Coming of age

Coming of age is a young person's transition from childhood to adulthood. The age at which this transition takes place varies in society, as does the nature of the transition. It can be a simple legal convention or can be part of a ritual, as practiced by many societies...

tale.

According to Hurst, it is a "brief, intense novel with incredible descriptive scenes" (n.d.), and Schmitz rates it as one of Paulsen's best.

Release details

• 1989, USA, Scholastic Press (ISBN 0-531-05839-5), Pub date ? September 1989, hardback (1st edition)
• 1989, USA, Orchard Books (ISBN 0-531-08439-6), Pub date ? October 1989, hardback
• 1996, USA, Yearling Books (ISBN 0-440-40454-1), Pub date ? July 1996, paperback
• 1991, USA, Perfection Learning Prebound (ISBN 0-7807-0416-9), Pub date ? September 1991, hardback
• 1991, USA, Bantam Doubleday Dell (ISBN 0-440-80228-8), Pub date ? April 1991, paperback
• 1995, USA, Yearling Books (ISBN 99954-61-53-6), Pub date ? February 1995, paperback
• 1996, ?, Laurel Leaf (ISBN 0-440-22031-9), Pub date 2 May 1996, paperback
• 1998, ?, Laurel Leaf (ISBN 0-440-22783-6), Pub date ? December 1998, paperback
• 1999, ?, Rebound by Sagebrush (ISBN 0-8335-6149-9), Pub date ? October 1999, hardback
• 2005, USA, Thorndike Press (ISBN 0-7862-7251-1), Pub date 16 February 2005, hardback (large print edition)