Customer Reviews

Light on Snow

5 star:		(48)
4 star:		(46)
3 star:		(28)
2 star:		(18)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

"Anita Shreve, a former high school teacher and prize-winning journalist, is best known as a novelist. "The Pilot's Wife," "All He Ever Wanted," "Fortunes Rocks," and "The Weight of Water," are some of her books which have absorbed and moved me. I have been looking forward to Ms. Shreve's latest offering, "Light On Snow," and the author does not disappoint with this extremely moving character study. Her astute insight into the gamut of human emotions is demonstrated in this simple story of grief and redemption. Here, two people, a father and his adolescent daughter, crippled by tragic loss, seek a semblance of their past lives in a bizarre event they literally stumble into, which impacts them both profoundly.

Nicky Dillon, now thirty, is the narrator. She reminisces back to the time she was twelve, living alone with her dad in an isolated house in the woods, just outside the town of Shepherd, NH. On a December day, near Christmastime, Robert Dillon's wife, Nicky's mother, and her baby sister, Clara, were killed in a car crash. Dillon chose Shepherd at random on his drive north with his remaining daughter, from their former home in Westchester, NY, because he could not drive on any longer. His goal was to remove himself as far as possible from society - to find a quiet place with no memories to bury his grief. Nicky, who was in terrible pain also, was faced with leaving the only home she had ever known, her friends and school, stability.

Two years later, on a cold, wintery afternoon in mid-December, Nicky and her father go for their usual late afternoon walk in the forest. The snowfall is heavy enough to make snowshoes necessary. Deep in the woods they find a newborn infant, abandoned in the snow, lying in a sleeping bag. She is wrapped in a bloody towel, umbilical cord still attached. If they had arrived at the scene a little later, the baby girl would have froze to death. Racing to the hospital they are in time to save the child. Both father and daughter are questioned by a very shrewd detective, and the police begin a search for the parents who could be charged with attempted murder, child abandonment and cruelty. Nicky, who has had to mourn alone for two years, desperately wants the baby to live with them. She wants to learn about the mother and what made her abandon her child. How could a woman make such a terrible choice?

There is a fascinating mystery here, but the novel's strength lies in the development of the characters. Twelve-year-old Nicky, on the cusp of young womanhood, is strong and very mature for her age. Perhaps it is the resilience of youth which gives her courage. She is the caretaker, the one who watches out for her father, a former architect who now takes solace in carpentry. Robert Dillon is narcissistic in his grief. By isolating himself, he forces isolation and loneliness on his daughter. Interspersed throughout the narrative are poignant memories of life with Nicky's mother and sister. Her mother will always remain young in Nicky's mind, while her sister grows up, just as she would if she were alive. At one point Nicky speaks of the small cast of characters with whom she frequently communicates - whose lives she remembers daily. "There are four of them in my little playlet: my mother who remains the same age she was when she died and who gives me bits of advice on how to handle my father; Clara, who is three and who is getting a Cabbage Patch doll for Christmas; Charlotte, who will do my hair and shop with me for clothes and be my friend; and also the Baby Doris, who might be having a bottle now. Or a nap."

There is an air of listlessness, hopelessness, throughout much of the novel. But this adds to the credibility. The mood lightens eventually as outside events force change. Ms Shreve's descriptions of small town New England, many of the novel's secondary characters, and the gorgeous frozen winter landscapes are rich and detailed. "Light On Snow" is different from Anita Shreve's other novels in that it is primarily character driven. It is a very good book and I do recommend it.

JANA

The tragic accidental death of Robert Dillon's wife and small daughter has irrevocably altered his life and left him literally staggering through the days in shock and disbelief. Twelve-year old Nicky wasn't home at the time of the accident, the effect on her as traumatic as anything yet experienced in her young life. Dillon's response is instinctive: he moves Nicky to rural New Hampshire, to a small house that is isolated from likely intrusion, effectively sealing off the family from the pain of the world.

Because of her youth, Nicky is quicker to recover, awakening after the long months of grief to find that her father simply cannot shake the depression that weighs upon him. He is barely functioning, turning out simple furniture that provides them with a meager income. They establish a few new routines, afternoon walks and make mostly unsuccessful attempts to engage as a family, albeit a broken one.

It is on one of their late afternoon walks through the darkening countryside buried in new snow, that they first hear whimpering. Finally locating the source of the cries, father and daughter discover a newborn baby, abandoned soon after its birth. After a harrowing ride to the hospital, the baby survives and the Dillon's return home, both in awe of what they have just accomplished. But while Robert ponders the kind of mother who could abandon her child, Nicky is harboring dreams of a changed family dynamic, one that includes the new baby. Robert disabuses Nicky of this idea, but a spark of rebellion has taken root in her soul.

When the baby's mother shows up on their doorstep, both father and daughter are uncomfortable, but before she can leave, Charlotte faints, still weakened by the recent birth. With a terrible storm descending upon their home, the Dillon's give shelter to the young woman. With a confused and desperate Charlotte under their roof, Robert and Nicky are confronted with the personal difficulty of making judgments of others. And Nicky is drawn to the slightly older Charlotte, seeking comfort in the womanly attentions she has not experienced since her mother's death.

Loss has taken a terrible toll on the Dillon family, but when Charlotte enters their lives, she brings a new awareness, challenging their complacency and willingness to bow to the grief that has so dominated their lives. In this small, deceptively simple story, Shreve addresses the important themes and critical choices that affect the three protagonists of Light on Snow. This intricate domestic drama is essentially a morality play; at the core of the novel is a simple theme of forgiveness and redemption. Luan Gaines/2004.

Light On Snow tells the story of Nicky, a twelve year old girl, and her father Robert taking a walk in the snow one winter day only to find an abandoned baby freezing and wrapped in a bloody towel and sleeping bag. They immediately rush home to warm the baby and then take her to the hospital where she can be properly cared for. While there, the police question Robert about the incident but he is released.

Days later as a snow storm is approaching, the mother of the baby comes to their home under the false pretense of looking for furniture, which Roberts makes in his barn. She eventually admits the truth about who she is, but by then it is too late for her to leave and Robert must make the decision of whether or not to turn her in to the authorities. He does not want anything to do with her but as they are faced with time alone, she tells him her side of story and his thoughts and feelings about her begin to change.

Light On Snow is a very haunting story about the decisions we make and what consequences those decisions make on us, and others. The writing is simple to read for being such a complex story. This is the perfect book to curl up and read on a cold winters day.

This is the first time I have felt the need to write a review on a book. The moment I started reading this book I felt a connection to the characters and could not stop reading. This book had me laugh, cry and feel happy. I will recommend this book to all of my friends for a book reading session just so I can read it again!!!!!

This is a book to read when a blizzard is coming, you're fixed cozily under a quilt, and you know there's enough milk in the house for a couple of days. LIGHT ON SNOW, Anita Shreve's latest novel, isn't comforting, exactly --- it's a tale of grief and loss, more like hot, bitter green tea than cocoa --- but it is wonderfully absorbing. The wintry New England landscape parallels the physical and emotional isolation of her father-and-daughter protagonists, and her writing, spare and unshowy, has near-perfect pitch.

Twelve-year-old Nicky Dillon (short for Nicole) and her father, Robert, are snowshoeing along on a walk in the woods when they find an abandoned baby in the snow, a girl. They rush her to the hospital, and her life is saved. But the major emotional event of the story has occurred before the book even begins, for Nicky and Robert are outsiders both by virtue of their location (the farmhouse they live in is at the end of a long, badly rutted road) and because of the car accident that killed Nicky's mother and her baby sister, Clara, three years ago. In a series of flashbacks, we become acquainted with the family, before and after. One day Nicky was a normal kid in Westchester; the next, she was moving with this grim, silent man to an old New Hampshire farmhouse.

The symmetry is inescapable --- one child lost; another rescued --- and it is not lost on Nicky. She mourns partly through fantasy, imagining what Clara would be like if she were still growing; she also pictures what would happen if she and her father adopted the baby they found in the snow. Robert, however, remains almost unreachable in his grief: "[It] has no texture now --- no tears, no ache in the throat, no rage," Nicky observes, watching him in his workshop in the barn (a former architect, he makes limited-edition furniture). "It is simply darkness, I think, a cloak that sometimes makes it hard for him to breathe."

Nicky is very much on her own; except for Christmas, when her grandmother comes to take care of them for a few days, she accepts that she must be the one who remembers to buy food or reminds her father to shave and wash his hair. At the same time, she yearns not only for her mother and sister, but also for a sense of normality: They have no TV, they don't read newspapers; they eat in the den, on trays; people rarely come to the house. Nicky goes to school, reads, knits and makes bead jewelry, and works on the mural of mountains that she is painting on her bedroom wall. She is an entrancing character, weirdly grown-up, yet also a kid who wants Drake's cakes, Ring Dings, 20 colors of nail polish --- and a woman to confide in.

Enter Charlotte, a young woman who comes to the house claiming to be a customer for Robert's furniture but who soon confesses that she is the mother of the baby they found --- she has read about the rescue in the newspaper and is desperate for news of her daughter. A blizzard traps Charlotte in the house, and gradually we learn the truth behind the horrifying discovery in the snow. In this respect, the book is a bit of a suspense novel, an imaginative reconstruction of what might lie behind those lurid newspaper headlines about teenagers dumping their unwanted infants in the garbage. Shreve maintains the tension well, making us curious to know the exact nature of the parallel tragedies that afflicted Charlotte and the Dillon family, letting out the answers a little at a time.

But it is on a deeper level that the book really succeeds. With Charlotte's presence in the Dillon house, we see Nicky's profound hunger for a friend. Although Charlotte is nearly as crushed by despair and regret as Robert, she is also younger and more resilient, and she responds to Nicky's obvious need. Emotional possibilities open up: "My father and I are technically a family," Nicky muses, "but it's a word neither of us would ever use. Yes, we are father and daughter, but because we were once members of a family that was torn apart, we think of ourselves now as half a family or a shadow family. As we sit there with our trays on our laps, however, I feel, or perhaps only imagine, a 'family' consisting of my father, Charlotte, and me." Perhaps it is only when a family is destroyed and must rebuild itself that we become aware of what it means to have one.

Shreve is a prolific writer and an impressively consistent one: Her popular books (THE PILOT'S WIFE was an Oprah Book Club selection) are very, very good, compulsively readable, and full of characters who have real quality and dimension. I believed wholeheartedly in Nicky; her strange, damaged, oddly endearing father; Detective Warren, the kind, relentless policeman who is trying to find out who abandoned the baby, and why; and Charlotte, with her aching, guilty heart and stubborn decency.

Complaints? Not many. The plot of LIGHT ON SNOW may be just a tad too neatly contrived and executed. Rather than that sense of absolute inevitability you get with great books, you feel the author's strategic hand at work. And although Shreve has Nicky narrating the story from the vantage point of a 30-year-old --- I suppose in order to allow her to impose a more mature vocabulary and sensibility on the memories of a girl of 12 --- she never follows up on her young heroine's adult life. I found myself disappointed not to get even a hint of Nicky's future, but perhaps that would have been too predictable an ending.

Besides, isn't it a fine compliment to say that a novel leaves you wanting more?

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

Light on Snow is told from the perspective of a 12 yr old girl who makes a transition to a young woman through the unfolding of events in this story that coincide with nature's changes in her body. Anita writes from this angle so well that she enables you to identify with the thought process of Nicky(12 yr old) and by doing this it is easy to enter into the heart and soul struggle and grief of Charlotte, the teenage mother. Unfortunately the ending does not complement the story...the crescendo of emotions and ideas are left with an undesirable and short changed conclusion. The underlying tragedy of Nicky and father that are flashed back upon are good..but the father's present state is almost just a little too unbelievable. Worth the read for the experience of being 12 going on 20 and a heart wrenching tale of being used deceived and regretful , but just a caution on the ending...that it may feel like a letdown. All in all..still a good read.

I had read Anita Shreve's book The Pilot's Wife and could not put that book down, but this book is heads and tails above that. I read this book in one weekend, quite a task for a 300 odd page book. This book draws you in from page one and you just keep reading to see what happens next. You are drawn in to a point where you can picture yourself sitting outside of this family's home watching all these things happen. An excellent, quick and thoroughly enjoyable read. I won't bother with what the book is about as the other reviewers have filled those blanks in for the readers interested. All I can say is I was reading and before I realized it I was half way through the book. Then started reading again for "just a few pages" and was finished with the book. Shreve at her best.

Anita Shreve explores the world through a sepia-toned light in her gorgeously written and perfectly described novels. In LIGHT ON SNOW, 12-year old Nicky and her widowed father discover an abandoned baby on a routine walk through the idyllic New Hampshire woods. Nicky is still recovering from the tragic loss of her mother and baby sister a few years earlier. The baby and her young mother provide Nicky and her father Robert the outlet for which to experience grief, forgiveness and the undeniable power of love. This story is told by Nicky, 18 years in the future but with the use of present tense to pull the reader into the moment. The moment when Nicky's world crumbled around her and was rebuilt with the strength and optimism that only a child can bring. Shreve writes with such simple and beautiful prose that reading her work is like giving yourself over to new eyes with which to regard the world.

Let me start by saying, I liked this book. Shreve fans who expect her usual plot-twist and somewhat thriller might be disappointed with this novel. However, I found myself engrossed in the story plucked sadly from the headlines. A baby abandoned in the snow, luckily discovered by a widower and his 12 year old daughter.

I found the depth in which Shreve describes the two main characters: father and daughter, very well done. You are given a sense of history of the two, which helps you identify with their struggle and accept their decisions. A third character, the abandoned baby's mother, enters the scene, and again, the depth with which Shreve describes her is very well done. Although her crime is heinous, she wins you over.

Obviously I will not give away the ending -- but I encourage her fans and new readers to stick with Shreve on this one. I have read all of her books, and although this is not my favorite (The Last Time They Met is by far!) I still found it to be an engrossing and a satisfying read. I liked this direction she has taken with this book - slightly different from her normal path of plot-twisting thrillers. I really enjoyed this one and I think you will too.

At age 30, the narrator of Shreve's latest novel, "Light on Snow," looks back at a dramatic, pivotal event in her childhood. Nicky Dillon, 12, and her father, Robert, live well off a back road in Shepherd, NH. Still at an age where she values her dad's company, Nicky presents herself in his woodworking shop after school for their usual late afternoon walk. It's December. Snow lies thick on the ground and the low sun is already setting. They don snowshoes and head uphill into the woods behind their isolated old house.

"I hear the first cry then, and I think it is a cat. I stop under a canopy of pine and listen, and there it is again. A rhythmic cry, a wail."

Her father dismisses it and they go on, following their usual route. They have lived in this rural isolation for two years and have developed new habits. "My father has lost the weight of a once-sedentary man. His jeans are threadbare in the thighs and tinged with the rusty fur of sawdust. At best, he shaves only every other day. His parka is beige, stained with spots of oil and grease and pine pitch. He cuts his hair himself, and his blue eyes are always a surprise."

The cry comes again and then once more as darkness falls. Nicky's father breaks into a run in his snowshoes. Finally his flashlight picks out a sleeping bag in the snow, a just-born infant blue-lipped inside it. Racing to save the child, Dillon's closely guarded privacy and isolation is threatened, first by police, suspicious of an unkempt loner who happens upon an infant while hiking in the frozen woods at night, then by eager, curious townspeople giddy with excitement, horror, and admiration.

But Dillon doesn't give in easily, resisting Detective Warren's intrusive questions and Nicky's desire to bask in the attention. But Nicky wants more than attention. She wants them to keep the rescued baby; to become a family again. As events unfold - discovery of the birth scene in a nearby motel, the hunt for people who would abandon their baby to die - Nicky reveals her own tragedy.

Her mother and baby sister died in a car accident two years before. Life with her father is shrouded in a cocoon of grief and silence. Unable to cope with the familiar trappings of home, Robert Dillon left his job as an architect and dragged his angry daughter from their Westchester, NY, home to make a new start apart from the world. Now he makes simple furniture while his daughter yearns for normalcy.

Shreve captures Nicky's voice perfectly. Looking back from an adult's perspective, she recalls these seminal events in present tense, revealing a 12-year-old's frenzied desperation, helplessness and fortitude, while occasionally stepping back to show the longer view.

Nicky, fascinated by the existence of this baby, reflects on luck, good for some, bad for others. If they hadn't found her in time, if they hadn't taken their walk, if they hadn't moved to Shepherd, if her mother and sister Clara hadn't died.... She knows they can't replace Clara with this new baby, but wants to try anyway, and she's full of wonder and horror at what sort of person could abandon a baby in the winter woods.

Dillon tries to return to his version of normalcy, though Nicky is less willing to let him, and more willing to risk his moods with the questions and thoughts that crowd her mind. Still, his presence and will are larger than hers and he might have succeeded , but for the arrival of a young woman and a storm. Nicky realizes who she is before her father does, and then the storm is upon them and it's too late for the abandoned baby's mother to leave. The next few days will be spent very much in each other's company.

This is an intimate, quietly charged novel; a close-up portrait of a loving father and daughter, thrown together in their grief and separated by a gulf of unspoken emotions. Shreve focuses on their personal reactions in the drama that unfolds, and its fulcrum effect on the life they've settled for. The simple, straightforward prose and the isolated snowbound setting increase the sense of forced intimacy. It's a story (however unlikely) that draws in the reader and fosters a strong sympathy for all involved.