After the blizzard this past weekend, I started thinking about favorite books involving snowstorms. If you like snowstorms as a backdrop/plot device, you’ll probably like….
— Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter
. I remember being enthralled by this book, about a whole winter snowed in with dwindling supplies, when I was little.
— There’s also a book about the 1888 blizzard in New York (young adult fiction) that I remember finding in the Middle School Library. I tried googling it, but wasn’t able to track it down, so if anyone else remembers this one….
— Moving on to adult fiction, Joan Wolf’s The Arrangement
(an excellent Regency romance) begins with an earl snowed in at the heroine’s humble home. I seem to recall there also being a snowstorm in Jill Barnett’s Bewitching
, a heartwarming Regency about a very correct nobleman and a very incorrect witch (think “Worst Witch Meets the Ton”).
— There’s no dearth of convenient snowstorms in modern romance. Judith McNaught’s heroine conveniently “loses” her keys in a snowdrift at a key moment in Paradise
, while another McNaught heroine finds herself snowed in with a convicted (but innocent?) murderer and former movie star in Perfect
.
— Some of my favorite mystery novels are also conveniently snowbound. There’s a wonderful snowstorm scene in Elizabeth Peters’s Trojan Gold
(the hero and heroine get stranded in an abandoned church overnight, brew tea in a flowerpot, and sing Bach), and a snowstorm also provides the backdrop for Donna Andrews’s more recent Six Geese A-Slaying
. Julia Spencer-Fleming also makes good use of the snowy landscape in In the Bleak Midwinter
, as her Virginia-bred heroine is forced to struggle with the elements in snowy upstate New York.
What are your favorite snowy books?
Appropriately, I just finished reading a snowstorm book last night: The Lady Most Willing… by Julia Quinn, Eloisa James and Connie Brockway. A blizzard in Scotland where 4 soon-to-be couples are stuck in a castle for the duration.
When I was a kid, I loved the Baby-sitters Club Super Special “Snowbound.” I recently rescued all my old BSC books from my parents’ basement, except all the Super Specials were missing. I think they’re at my cousin’s house but she hasn’t had a chance to look for them yet. I hope they’re there!
I think I also read that book about the 1888 blizzard way back in the 90s, but I can’t seem to figure out which one it was either.
I loved the Long Winter as a kid. I’ve been thinking about giving the Little House books another read through now that I’m older.
Since my beloved grandmother was born in St. Petersburg exactly during The Revolution, I’m obsessed about Russian Winters – from Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago”, Boris Akunin’s mystery “The Winter Queen”, my favorite Simon Montefiore’s gem “Sashenka”, Krisin Hannah’s “Winter Garden”, Debra Dean’s “The Madonnas of Leningrad” and Paullina Simons’ series to Daphne Kalotay’s “Russian Winter” of course!
Mary Balogh’s “Simply Unforgettable” uses a snowstorm to get things rolling.
I have never thought of “blizzard” as a genre, but I LOVED The Long Winter.
Then again, I’m from Michigan and “blizzard” is hard to distinguish from “lake effect snow” or as we knew it in college, Wednesday.
I loved The Little House books, particularly Little House in the Big Woods. I remember making maple candy the way they did with snow as a child. Jack Finney’s Time and Again takes place during the Blizzard of 1888 and I remember a romance novel that took place during that time but I can’t remember who wrote it either.
I like a novella by Stephanie Laurens called Scandalous Lord Dere (which originally appeared in the anthology Secrets of a Perfect Night). The hero gets caught in a blizzard, wrecks his carriage, and falls over the threshold of a cottage frozen to the bone…
Thank you so much for mentioning The Arrangement. It is a fantastic book.