The Children's Blizzard by Melanie Benjamin

 Based on a little-known blizzard that struck the Great Plains on January 12th, 1888. “The storm hit at precisely the wrong time here in northeastern Nebraska, southeastern Dakota. (…) It hit right when most schools were about to disgorge its pupils for the day, or just had.”

Gavin Woodson, a newspaperman in Omaha, “writes for the state’s boosters and railroad investors, advertising Nebraska as the Garden of Eden, something it was not. To sell all these acres, recently won from the Indians, to rubes and immigrants who didn’t know any better. To settle this state, grow the population… (…) and make the businessmen, the investors, the railroads happy. And very rich.”

January 1888, Nebraska. When unexpected blizzard strikes during a time of day when children are at school, sixteen-year-old Raina Olsen, a schoolteacher, must make a decision to either stay at school, where they can freeze to death when fuel rans out or to send children home and hope they wouldn’t get lost in the storm.

Same day, Dakota Territory. Gerda Olsen, a school teacher like her younger sister, faces the same storm. She makes a different decision than her sister. Afterwards, one becomes a hero of the storm and one finds herself ostracized.

After the storm, Gavin Woodson seeks redemption with his new focus on story writing.

I’m in awe with this author’s writing. This is a third book by this author that I’ve read this year and I already have two more books by her lined up. The character development is something that stands out in her writing. The well-developed characters you get attached to from the very first pages. Characters you care for and sympathize with.

The storytelling is masterful as well, you’re eager to find out what happens next; how things turn out for each character.

The atmosphere of the blizzard is well-expressed. The cold, the lack of visibility, the helplessness to find the direction home when snow is blowing in your eyes and freezing them, with “pummeling, knifelike wind.” And aftermath, the frozen parts of the body and the amputations. It’s all so real.

Touchingly written. Fully explored dimensions, creating interesting characters and unforgettable story with good sense of place and time period.

Release date: 12 January 2021

Source: Delacorte Press