Customer Reviews

When the Snow Falls or Fifty-Fifty

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Well, it snowed here yesterday so that prompted me to read a book I've had at hand for a while, now: "When the Snow Falls" by Michael Lawrence.

This put me a bit in mind of Beryl Netherclift's "The Snowstorm" (aka "The Snow Ghosts") because the focal point of the unusual happenings in this book is a snow globe containing a miniature model of the home in which the protagonists live. In this story, however, the snow globe allows travel not from one time to another (as in Netherclift's story), but between parallel worlds. It's an interesting (if short) novel; recommended.

Now, the interesting thing about this book is that about a decade after it was written, the author totally re-wrote the story and had the new version published as the first book in a trilogy: "A Crack in the Line." The revamped novel has the same characters and basic plot, but was written with an older audience in mind; the revised story is much longer and darker (downright grim in places). I can't think of many authors who have done this sort of thing; one of the only ones that comes to mind right off is Frances Hodgson Burnett with "Sara Crewe"/"A Little Princess." Oh, and Anthony Horowitz actually rewrote an entire series of four or five books; his "Gatekeepers" series is a revision of an earlier set of novels that are very difficult to find nowadays.
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FROM THE BACK COVER: In the two years since the tragedy that tore the heart out of his family, Rob Harrison's world has crumbled around him. And it looks as if it's not going to get any better.

But then the snow falls.

The snow falls and things start to happen. Staggering, unbelievable things. Rob is shown how his life might have been---should have been. And then there's Bobby. Bobby, the girl who lives in a house just like his own, and looks exactly like him...

Michael Lawrence's first novel for children is a fascinating tale of Chance. It takes a dramatic event and shows the two ways things might have gone as a result of it. A book to stir the imagination. A book with two endings....
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FROM JUNIOR BOOKSHELF: For his first novel Michael Lawrence has chosen to play ducks and drakes with the old established philosophical tenet that nothing can both be and not be in the same time and place. Molly Harrison is involved in a serious car accident and given a fifty-fifty chance of survival. In When the Snow Falls she both dies and survives. How her husband and child cope with such a development leading in such differing directions is explored in fascinating detail.

Molly's death leaves her distraught husband and their son Rob to go into a decline amid the squalor of the neglected house while her recovery brings success in business to her husband, happiness to her daughter Bobby in that same house, lovingly furnished and freshly decorated. So far so good - but suppose Rob and Bobby were to meet? What then, indeed!

Various details begin to build up into a contradiction seemingly impossible to resolve. The mixture is, however, cunningly stirred until Rob and Bobby find themselves unexpectedly stuck in each other's environment. .... With striking sleight of hand the author...somewhat saucily throws in alternative endings for good measure.

Hopefully, some enterprising film director will be introduced to the scenario of When the Snow Falls and have fun illuminating it with all the tricks available to the modern film maker. Learned philosophers may lie awake at night wrestling with the possible consequences of abandonment of the principle of non-contradiction but Michael Lawrence is to be congratulated on having produced so outwardly attractive and entertaining a can of logical worms.