The Coldest Winter Ever

The Coldest Winter Ever is a novel by the American writer and activist Sister Souljah, published in 1999.

It is set in Brooklyn and told in the first person by Winter Santiaga, the teenage daughter of Ricky Santiaga, a local drug kingpin. Winter is brash and self-important, certain of what she is owed, and well known in her neighbourhood because of who her father is. That changes when he is arrested for drug trafficking and she ends up in a girls' home, where she starts selling things to the other girls to keep herself in money, using the trade her father taught her without meaning to.

The novel stays in Winter's voice from beginning to end, in the slang of the hip-hop culture she has grown up inside, and it follows her through the years after the arrest and the decisions that carry her further from the life she was raised in. She is not a character who asks to be sympathised with, and the book does not stand outside her to make the judgement for the reader. A prequel and a sequel followed it many years later.