“Light on Snow” is the first Anita Shreve novel I’ve read, and I really enjoyed it.
Nicky Dillon is a twelve-year-old girl whose mother and baby sister were killed in a car accident two years before. Her father was completely bereft and sold their house, packing up all their things and taking them to New England, where he hoped they would make a brand new start. Nicky doesn’t like the fact that they’ve left every aspect of their old life behind, but she knows he needs this, so she tries to go along with it.
One afternoon she and her father take a walk through the thickly wooded area near their home, crunching their way on snowshoes. Up ahead, they hear a thin cry, and they go to investigate. They find a newborn baby, wrapped in a towel and a sleeping bag, abandoned in the snow. They take the child to the hospital, where they are told the baby would have to lose a finger to frostbite, but that she would be just fine. They are also told that the baby was barely born just before she was abandoned.
Further investigation reveals that the baby was born in a hotel room just down the road, and the police badly want to catch the mother and arrest her for abandoning her baby to die.
Nicky feels a sense of attachment to the baby, and remembers what it was like to have a baby sister. Her father was also deeply moved by the experience. Just ten days after finding the baby, they are surprised when a young woman comes to the door, and announces that she’s the baby’s mother and has come to thank them for saving her child. She then passes out on the floor.
They take her in and while nursing her back to health, hear snatches of her story. Nicky wants her to stay, but her father knows she has to go talk to the authorities. They harbor her for two days while she rests up, and then she is arrested by the police.
This book is fascinatingly introspective. We live in the present day with Nicky but we also see her memories as she tells us about her mother and sister, what things were like before they were killed, and how she wishes things could be. There are some passages vaguely mentioning the process of delivery and coming of age, but they are spoken of tactfully.
(This book was published in 2004 by Back Bay Books.)
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