Characters to warm up to in a cold, cold climate

“Light on Snow,”
by Anita Shreve

When as a reader you are drawn into a story, when you rush home from work to pick up reading where you left off, when you get out of bed and start reading while you are pouring your morning coffee half into the cup and half onto the kitchen counter, and when, in the end, you wish there were a few more chapters, that’s a good book.

“Light on Snow” is that kind of read.

Anita Shreve pulls us into the lives of Nicky and Robert Dillon, a daughter and father who find a baby in the snowy woods near their New Hampshire home. How they react -- and how their reactions impact their lives -- reveals not just a life-saving response for the infant but a chance to reclaim the lives they have run to the northern forest to escape.

Part crime story, part family-relationship story, part mystery, “Light on Snow” is so much more than any literary genre can describe, and it’s because Shreve makes us care about the characters. The Dillons are people we want to know – people we want to reach out to – people we want to do the right thing – for their own sake, for their own sanity, for their own saintliness. - bz