After Halloween, it feels like everyone and their mom is shifting gears towards winter, leaving me no choice but to succumb to the winter feeling and leave my favorite season behind prematurely. This year, as I watched the Dunkin’ menu immediately switch to peppermint mochas come November 1st, I decided enough was enough. I was going to live out the season to its fullest even if no one else was. If you are dying to keep the fall vibes going like I am, I’ve put together a list of post-Halloween fall books that instantly bring me back into a world of crunchy leaves and dramatically staring out rainy windows for your perusal.
Scorpio Races
In my mind, Maggie Stiefvater’s other book series, The Raven Cycle is both superior in content and fall vibes, but only one of those books actually takes place during fall and I know I only want to recommend it because I’m obsessed. That being said, Scorpio Races is also really good and very much takes place in November. The whole book has a chilly New England cliffside vibe that’s perfect in its somberness and coziness. It also helps that the book, like many Stiefvater projects, has incorporations of Virginia lore, in this case the Chincoteague horse races. Puck, the main character, is forced to enter in the Scorpio Races alongside the reigning champion Sean. The races themselves are a dangerous, and sometimes deadly, competition where contestants attempt to ride water horses of Celtic mythology. The characterization is great and while the world itself feels largely unexplored, the glimpse we do get is fantastic.
Cemetery Boys
Cemetery Boys was a book I picked up to avoid family interaction last Thanksgiving, which worked out fantastic because I literally could not put it down. The book takes place during Día de Muertos. as the main character, Yadriel, accidentally summons a ghost during a ritual ceremony. It’s a really sweet and light-hearted adventure that has some solid trans and queer representation – and it was Aiden Thomas’ debut novel. Since it takes place directly after Halloween, it fills a small hole in my heart left by my favorite holiday and is hopefully the first of many magic-filled books based around Día de Muertos.
Moominvalley in November
If you’ve never read a Moomin book you are seriously missing out. Like Winnie the Pooh or Brambly Hedge, Moominvalley is a world of comforting creatures who learn lessons about friendship and family as they go about their daily lives. Since Moomins hibernate, most of the books take place in the Springtime or Summer – which makes Moominvalley in November a special outlier in that it doesn’t actually focus on the Moomins at all.
Instead, the book focuses on all the characters wishing to seek out the Moomins, only to find them gone away on holiday. This book is strangely sad for a children’s novel, but manages to tackle loneliness and depression in a really meaningful way without it feeling too heavy-handed. This is the last of the Moomin book series Tove Jansson wrote and the only one she wrote after her mother’s death, and because of this it ends up being a hard read for me personally. However, I still seek it out on particularly bleak November days. Sometimes it’s nice to remember that loneliness isn’t a solitary feeling.
The Girl from the Other Side: Siúil, a Rún
The Girl From the Other Side is actually not a novel, but an 11-volume manga by Nagabe. Although the manga spans across several seasons, its general comfy, yet melancholic atmosphere makes it a particular late-fall, early-winter read for me. The art is gorgeous in both the thin, layered line work and the occasional full-color spread between chapters, which both translate well into its movie adaptation. The darker aspects of the story are balanced by the loving father-daughter relationship fostered between the monster and the small girl he takes care of. This series is an all-time comfort for me as well as a pretty quick afternoon read.
Sample-Size Extras
The last isn’t a single novel, but instead a few novellas and short stories by the same author, T. Kingfisher. Something about fairytale retellings is just so fall for me. Maybe it’s the nostalgia, or the fact that many of the most common fairy tales in American pop culture take place in a rainy and dreary European environment. Either way, T. Kingfisher provides a variety of bite-size retellings with refreshing plots that create their own tale rather than relying on the backbone or plot-skeleton of the original. A few I’d specifically recommend are Thornhedge, Toad Words and Other Stories, and Bryony and Roses. Their horror novellas are also worth a read, however the spookiness seems more in line with a pre-Halloween October than the November vibes I’m going for.
Hopefully these books put you back in the fall spirit and bring comfort enough to cure away the November blues. Or at the very least help you discover a new author to read regardless of the season.