I've Read Some Things: Part 3 of 3

The other book I read this week was Anita Shreve's Light on Snow.

This one, I really, really liked. The ending was again, too quick, and the size of the print on the page really made me realize how short a book it was: it was almost like a novella to me. I'm OK with that, though, because it was on the clearance rack at Half-Price Books, and I got it for $1. You can't beat that. (Coincidentally, that's exactly how much I paid for A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, which I'm reading next, out of sheer and immutable curiosity.)

Without diving too deeply into it, Light on Snow is written in the voice of 12-year-old Nicky, who lost her mother and little sister in a car crash two years ago and was forced by her grieving father to move out in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire. One day, while taking a walk, father and daughter discover a baby, abandoned in the snow. They scoop the baby up and take her to the hospital. The paper writes a story about it and the baby's mother reads it and ends up visiting their home. She gets stuck there because of a snowstorm and it goes from there.

I thought it was one of the most genuine books I've read in awhile. Shreve captured the voice of a twelve-year-old very believably. She showed the struggle of the child to understand this horrible thing she has seen - and then the struggle to place the baby's mom in the whole puzzle, when she really just wants the baby's mom to love her and become part of the family.

There's an amazing optimism to the character of Nicky. She is the total opposite of her father - a person who, when something horrible happens to him in the loss of his wife and daughter, shuts himself off from everyone and everything. Nicky just wants to reach out and live, and it's an amazing dichotomy.

Anyway, highly recommended, that one.

Now, to talk about my kids...