Lead Review (Blizzard)

• Book: Blizzard
• Location: Alaska
• Author: Marie Vingtras, Stephanie Smee (translator)

Review Author: tripfiction

This is the Alaskan wilderness, in all its frozen harshness, with snow piled up to roof levels and driving winds blasting through every crevice. The novel opens just as Bess sets out into the raging storm with a 10 year old child in tow. She lets go of his hand and he disappears. She is not his biological mother.

And thus a small community of men is mobilised to start the hunt for Bess and for the child. Benedict, the child’s father, calls on his near neighbours, who, with varying degrees of enthusiasm embark on the search. As the wind drops and the snow mobile briefly fails, there is a real sense of pressing time.

Bess briefly removes her beanie as she tries to make headway and her sweat freezes in a split second. A small child on his own, battling the elements, really has no chance of survival.

She finds her way to a house where she senses the child might have gone. It is the house of Benedict’s brother, who has long since disappeared, and as the storyline moves forward, we discover the individual back stories of the characters, and how there are links. The current dangerous situation somehow crystallises resentments and animosities, which leads to the “breathtaking climax” (but, to be honest, if you have been paying attention to the undertows snaking around beneath this tiny community and the connections between the characters, it isn’t that surprising).

This is a tight story, told in a short novel of 155 pages, with short chapters. This part of Alaska is bleak, the weather has a huge influence on the locals, and people’s lives have no room for the niceties of societal norms. There is racism and misogyny and ultimately the reader comes to perhaps understand why these people are living where they do, but it is all rather depressing and visceral.

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