Winter is a young adult novel by John Marsden in 2000. Winter, the protagonist of the story, returns to the family estate which she left at the age of four when her parents died. She finds that everything is not as it seems when she visits her parents' graves, and she is determined to uncover the answers.
Winter has been well received by the literary audience. However, it has not received the same critical acclaim as some of Marsden's other works, including the Tomorrow series, Letters from the Inside and So Much to Tell You.
Winter was inspired by Marsden's own experience of moving into a rundown house in the country. The descriptions of Winter's house and her efforts to restore it are a real-life description of Marsden's own house, and his own efforts to restore it.
Plot summary
Winter is a headstrong 16-year-old girl whose parents died when she was 4. Since then she has lived with her mother's half sister and her husband, the Robinsons. At the start of the book, she returns to her parents’ home, drawn by a desire to know what happened to them. She was also motivated by a mysterious desire to return to the place she grew up in, surrounded by memories, notably of her parents.
Upon arriving, Winter is welcomed by the caretakers of the property, Ralph and Sylvia, but she insists on staying in her parents’ house, not theirs. She finds that her house is very run-down and negotiates with Mr. Carruthers, the manager of the estate and of the trust left to her by her parents, to renovate it. Later on, she discovers that Ralph and Sylvia have been carrying out illegal business on her property. They have been using the money from Winter's family trust for their own profit, rather than to maintain the estate, which was what they were employed to do. Upon discovering this, Winter insists that Mr Carruthers fire Ralph and Sylvia, much to the delight of many of her neighbours.
Winter also makes the effort to meet several people in the town who knew her parents. She meets Matthew Kennedy, a young man from a neighbouring farm. Their first encounter is fiesty. Winter yells at him for trespassing on her property, only to find out that she had crossed over onto his property during her walk. Throughout the novel, Winter becomes friends with Matthew.
She also meets Bruce McGill, an architect who knew her parents well. During her first meeting with Bruce, Winter discovers that she has a great aunt. She is shocked to discover this, and even more shocked that nobody told her. Everyone seemed to think that she had been told by someone else. He organises the renovation of her house and invites her to his house for dinner. There, Winter meets his daughter, Jesse, and they become friends. Jesse encourages Winter to develop her singing talents and to apply for a college singing course.
One day, Winter discovers from Sylvia that her parents are buried on the property. She is surprised by this, and especially surprised by the fact that she had never been told, nor taken to visit her parents’ graves. When she goes to find them, she discovers that her parents died 6 months apart. This is contrary to what she had been told; that they had died together in the Sydney to Hobart yacht race, and prompts her to question how her parents really died. She questions several people. First, Mr. Carruthers, who expresses his disapproval that the Robinson's did not tell her how her parents died. He then tells her that while her father did indeed die in the Sydney to Hobart yaucht race, her mother died in a shooting accident. However, Winter is puzzled by this, as her mother was a prolific shooter, and held two Australian records for marksmanship. She thinks that it is strange that she would have been so careless as to allow such an accident to occur. She continues to ask others in the district, including Mr Kennedy (Matthew Kennedy's Dad) and Dr. Couples, the doctor who attended the scene of her mother's death. However, they only confirm what others told her; that her mother died in a shooting accident.
One day she goes to see her great aunt. Her aunt does nOt want to see her, and Winter protests until she agrees to. She asks her aunt about her mother's death, but while talking to her, she remembers what happened to her mother. She, Winter, had picked up one of her mother's spare guns and shot it playfully, accidentally killing her mother. Her great aunt had shielded her from this by making it look like an accident.
At the end of the novel, Winter comes to peace with this and falls in love with one of her neighbours, Matthew Kennedy. Having completed the renovations at her parents’ home, she lives there with another neighbour, Jess. (Marsden, 2000b)