Blizzard
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3.8 • 6 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A runaway bestseller about a boy gone missing in the middle of an Alaskan blizzard, and the people desperate to find him—from multi-award-winning author Marie Vingtras.
Winner of the Prix Des Libraires, the French Booksellers’ Prize for Best Novel of the Year
In the middle of a raging storm in Alaska, Bess stops to tie her shoes. And just like that, the boy is lost, gone in a flash, swallowed up by the snow.
Bess is a California girl, while Benedict, with whom she and the boy live, is the last in his family’s long line of rugged Alaskans. Benedict knows better than to venture out in such weather. But he has no choice. He must find Bess and the boy before it’s too late.
Blizzard is a race against death and destiny. Benedict, the local, and Bess, the outsider, are joined in the frantic search by Cole, an unsavory figure who washed up decades ago and clings on, downing moonshine. Then there’s Freeman, a Black Vietnam vet who seems wholly out of place in the North. What brings him to this remote corner of Alaska? What secrets is he hiding—are they all hiding? And will they find the truth? An award-winning page-turner, Blizzard is a breathless panorama of lonely souls making a life for themselves in the Far North, and of the dark truths they carry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this elegant debut, Vingtras details the high-stakes search for a missing child from the alternating perspectives of four narrators. Bess, an attractive young woman, has lost track of a precocious, initially unnamed 10-year-old boy in the middle of a heavy snowstorm somewhere in Alaska ("I let go of his hand to retie my laces and I lost him"). As the storm grows fiercer, Bess's search for the boy intensifies, and the three other narrators come into focus. Benedict lives with Bess for unspecified reasons and is particularly invested in recovering the child; Cole is their rage-filled, alcoholic neighbor; and Freeman, a military veteran and ex-cop, has traveled to Alaska on a mysterious assignment. In short, spiky chapters, Vingtras slowly doles out clues about the characters' connections to one another, keeping readers deliciously off-balance as Bess's search for her charge joins up with larger, more sinister machinations. With masterly pacing, the author knits together a noirish and affecting tale about desperate souls colliding. It's worth staying up all night to finish.
