Customer Reviews

Snowfall: Book One of the Snowfall Trilogy

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have mixed feelings about this novel. On one hand, it has a pretty neat premise: The impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy with Jupiter in 1994 perturbed that planet's orbit imperceptibly, yet just enough to cause gradual climatic change on Earth, and hundreds of years later we are in the grip of a new Ice Age. Cool idea! Yet I'm troubled by the fact that such climate change would necessarily result in the catastrophic setback of science and culture depicted in this book. If the climate change had been accompanied by, for instance, a few good meteor impacts, the tribal existence of the book's protagonists would have been far more plausible. Too many questions are left unanswered here, and "Snowfall" is left begging for a sequel.

That having been said, I still found this novel quite entertaining. I've always been a sucker for post-apocalyptic sci-fi, although there is precious little sci-fi here. Instead Mitchell Smith has painted a rich picture of a tribal community that calls itself the Trappers, living a tooth-and-nail existence just below the Wall Of Ice that engulfed Canada and the northern half of the United States. Having been forced off their land by tribes that have in turn been forced off THEIR land, the remnants of the Trappers must move south to warmer climes and strange human cultures. There are some memorable, well-drawn characters in this tale, most notably Catania, the tribe's doctor and preserver of ancient medical knowledge. Tribal warfare, sickness and death are portrayed unflinchingly here. The book is divided into short, easily digested chapters, each beginning with an excerpt from Catania's journal. Definitely worth a look if you like books of this genre.

Thanks to Amazon.com I found yet another author that I never heard of but writes a novel that sounded very interesting to me. If you like novels in the grand tradition of William Sarabande's FIRST AMERICANS series, or like post-holocaust adventure stories - then this one's for you!
Mitchell Smith's SNOWFALL is a well told tale of an Earth that has gone through another ice age and has taken civilization away, leaving cities such as Chicago, with snowdrifts as high as the tallest skyscrapers. It is never told what exactly happened to the earth, but it is told and hinted to a long, long, time ago as the story is taking place.
The story opens with a band known as the Trappers, a small collection of families that united and hunt the frozen tundra of what once was Colorado,I think. Their only link to the past is old journals and books that have been re-copied over and over thru time and they call copybooks.
The first chapter starts right off with the hunters of the band getting food for their camp when they are attacked by Cree. The Cree are the modern-day equivalent of indians, but most of their bloodline are white, they have just taken to the old indian ways of survival. As the story goes on, the trappers are being forced out of their hunting grounds and being pushed south, along with all the other tribes from the north, like a dominoe effect. Fighting to keep their land, the trapper's, along with an outcast that comes back named Jack, a losing fight ensues and most of the trappers are decimated and Jack finds himself a leader of a band on the run. The band's head doctor of the tribe is a clorful woman named Catania. Catania is much more than a doctor as the reader finds out as the story unfolds. I thought that this book would not have much action and adventure that I'm partial too, but it had it plenty enough along with lots of interesting characters to keep you glued to each page.
The adventures and tragedies that befall the running band of trappers as they flee ever southward is an enjoyable read as the reader see's the changes in the land and it's peoples as the trappers go deeper south. The ending is not what I expected, but it was good nonetheless. It read like an epic movie. I recommend this book to anyone.

Set in the future after the next ice age has destroyed most of civilization, this is a story about Dr. Catania Olsen a member of the Trappers tribe, a group by people living in the North at the edge of the glacial wall. Enough time has passed so that most knowledge has been lost. Civilization is still on the fall. It is a brutal time and life is very hard. Catania's tribe is attacked and forced to move.

The tribe meets the Garden people, which live in the forest. There Catania meets the rather extreme one-eyed doctor. Catania must tread carefully with the half-mad woman.

I enjoyed this story. It is creative and well thought out. We are not presented a world where humanity bravely steps up to and overcomes a challenge, but where it descends back into darkness and merely strives for survival.

An interesting story.

In 1998, humanity learned a cold hard lesson about the interrelationship of the solar system. Comets and fragments hammered Jupiter causing a minute, seemingly statistically insignificant shift in the giant planet's orbit. Insignificant to Jupiter turns out to be colossal to Earth as that almost undetectable shift over two hundred years later has caused a monstrous new ice age on the earth.

This wall of ice is so big that almost all of Chicago is buried under it and so wide the North America continent is divided in two. Clans barter, fight, and compete for supremacy in a harsh land. For instance, the Trappers are hunters with some knowledge of the past eke a living in the frozen Colorado Mountains. When barbaric invaders from the north attack, the Trappers flee led by Jack Monroe and Dr. Catania Olsen to the south. They seek peace and domestic tranquilly, but only find a vast wasteland of savageness. Still they keep searching for a better life.

SNOWFALL is a great apocalypse tale that uses a real solar event to cause an incredible catastrophe on earth that leads to a deep tale of future survival. The story line is very exciting, as the action never slows down yet readers care about the Trappers, especially the lead duo, whose struggles seem so real. Fans of future dark global calamities will want to revise their short term reading plan by placing Mitchell Smith's tremendous thriller at the top of the to read immediately food chain.

Harriet Klausner

Life after the fall of western civilization would be rough for sure. You can see that in all gritty realism in this book.

I got it two years ago and read a bit of it and then quit reading it for a while. It sort of grossed me out to tell the truth. The author made no bones about describing bodily functions and the like. I liked the general premise of the book, though and I only have about a page left to read. I'm not sure I will continue with the series, because I read an awful lot and the competition for my attention is pretty fierce.

If you like Sci-Fi, this may not be for you. The action and entire story takes place after the fall of western civilization and there are very few references to any Sci-Fi subject manner. This reads more like a western novel, I imagine.

Having just now finished reading the book and having scanned reviews ranging from one star to five stars, I feel like I have to weigh in emphatically on the side of those who love this book. If you take what this book is and don't try to compare it to the hordes of nuclear war/EMP/comet crashing post apocalyptic books, this stands on its own as a unique and highly engaging far future story in a world where cities and cars and modern civilization is a distant memory handed down through hand-copied versions of books from the distant past.

Whether the Jupiter reference on the opening quote page is actually the cause of the new ice age that is the backdrop for this book is of no relevance, and reviewers who are looking for hard sci-fi may not like it, but its just not meant to be a fact-based future but a "might-be" future of hard living in a sparsely populated future where summer is measured in weeks and a mile high glacier stretches right across what was the US lifetimes ago.

What Mitchell has done so well is create a whole vernacular and way of life that relates to things we take for granted in almost a religious and mystical way. Phrases and idioms that we use every day are, to them, all learned from the hard earned "copy-books" that they trade for and value dearly.

I won't recount the story (we all hate spoilers), but having read many fantasy books as well as all the standard post apocalyptic literature from On the Beach to Alas, Babylon to Swan's Song to The Stand, this book was refreshing in that it doesn't rehash the same themes of struggle just after the attack or just after the comet hits or just after the virus strikes. This is the far future, survival in a world that, in its own way, is just being born. What is fascinating here is that their way of life only resembles our way of life in a superficial way, and it feels authentic within the world that the author has created. The lives they live are not like our in many ways at all, and the social fabric, social norms and lifestyle of Snowfall's characters will at turns shock you and then ultimately intrigue you.

It is true that there is abundant violence and sexual language, however I think it fits within the books world view. This is a true post apocalyptic book that will give you not only a great read but will also make you laugh at the way these future inhabitants try to understand how we lived our lives without any frame of reference. It is well worth reading.

I was surprised by this book. I really thought it was a kind of pulp post apocalyptic thing, but I usually like that so I got it. It was far deeper and intricate than I anticipated. The characters were not cookie cutter carbons but had interesting fragilities. One moment in the book, where the women of the tribe, spend their last minutes shooting arrows into the enemy as their toddlers stood beside them nearly made me cry. Anyway, for pulp Sci-Fi, it was good. Peace to you.

This is an underwhelming story that leads into a very underwhelming trilogy of stories.

In this one we're introduced to characters and themes that only serve to move the story from point A to point B without much more than a cursory examination.

The more interesting themes in this book are either mentioned in passing, such as the city of Chicago buried in ice, or disregarded after flirtations, a town of tree-dwellers who want to preserve some knowledge and old time manufacturing.

It seems as if half way into writing this novel the author totally got lost or bored of the entire Post-Apocalyptic setting and wanted to come to an easy conclusion just to set up another book where everything is different from this one.

In a nutshell, a group of people see their whole tribe slaughtered, flee south, kill some of their own, flee again, get slaughtered some more, until there are so few left the only thing to do is split them up with no resolution and start setting up for the next book.

Lazy and uninspired storytelling leads to a lame and uninteresting story using only the themes setup on the dust jacket. I also found the second novel in this series to be worse than this one as a whole, I will not even task myself with attempting the third in the trilogy.

Reminds me more of Fantasy than Post-apocalytic. Lots of GRAPHIC violence in the battle descriptions, not for youngsters or those with "iffy" stomachs.

Book 1 of the Snowfall Trilogy brings you to a PA world that avoids many of the usual cliches - no nuclear attack, no mysterious virus that wipes out most of mankind, no zombies (not that I object to any of those, but they HAVE been over-used). Mitchell Smith's frozen world 600 years in the future is engaging, the characters complex and the plot never fails to keep you turning the page (or clicking next page).

The next two books only get better, so keep reading!