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Searching... Monmouth Public Library | YA Fic Crockett, S. 2012 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Salem Main Library | TEEN FICTION Crockett, S. | Searching... Unknown |
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Searching... Silver Falls Library | YA CROCKETT | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
The oceans stopped working before Willo was born, so the world of ice and snow is all he's ever known. He lives with his family deep in the wilderness, far from the government's controlling grasp. Willo's survival skills are put to the test when he arrives home one day to find his family gone. It could be the government; it could be scavengers--all Willo knows is he has to find refuge and his family. It is a journey that will take him into the city he's always avoided, with a girl who needs his help more than he knows.
S.D. Crockett on narrative voice and an especially cold winter:
What was your inspiration for After the Snow ?
Well, apart from the unbelievably cold winter during which I was writing--in an unheated house, chopping logs and digging my car out of the snow; I think much of the inspiration for the settings in After the Snow came from my various travels.
In my twenties I worked as a timber buyer in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia, and that work led to travels in Eastern Europe and Armenia. As soon as I step off the plane in those places it smells like home.
It may sound strange to say, when After the Snow is set in Wales, but really the practical dilemmas in the book come directly from places I've been, people I've lived with, and the hardships I've seen endured with grace and capability. I was in Russia not long after the Soviet Union collapsed and I've seen society in freefall. Without realizing it at the time I think those experiences led me to dive into After the Snow with real passion.
What would western civilization look like with a few tumbles under its belt? What would happen if the things we took for granted disappeared? I wanted to write a gripping story about that scenario, but hardly felt that I was straying into fantasy in the detail.
What do you want readers to most remember about After the Snow ?
We all have the capacity to survive, but in what manner? What do we turn to in those times of trouble? Those are the questions I would like people to contemplate after reading After the Snow .
How did Willo's unique voice come to you?
Willo's voice appeared in those crucial first few paragraphs. After that it just grew along with his world and the terrible situations that arise. I think his voice is in all of us. We don't understand, we try to make good--maybe we find ourselves.
How did you stay warm while writing this novel?
I banked up the fire--and was warmed by hopes of spring.
Author Notes
After the extremely hard winter of 2009, S. D. Crockett asked herself, "What if winter never ended?" and from that thought, her debut novel, After the Snow , was born. Crockett lives in the United Kingdom.
Reviews (6)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 8 Up-What if, instead of a warmer future, "every thing got proper cold"? What if "the seas stopped working," and those who didn't move to the crowded, smelly cities approved by the government became "stealers" and "stragglers" and lived off the grid? Russia and China are big influences in this new order, and the yuan is the preferred currency. Willo's family are stragglers, living in the frigid mountains of Wales. Willo has a talent for hunting and helps his father turn hides into finely crafted coats, boots, and gloves. Cat and dog make the finest furs, though Willo catches mostly rabbits. When he returns from a hunt to find the cabin deserted, he knows something bad has happened. He packs a sled with supplies and heads off to find his family. His first encounter is with Mary, almost starving, whose father is a pony man, also missing. Willo intends to take Mary only as far as the power lines, where she can be picked up by a snow truck, but events tumble both teens onto a transport into the city. The bones of this story are not new: civilization trying to reform after human-caused catastrophe. Some people try to make a better world, and others ask only what's in it for them. What elevates Snow is the voice Crockett uses to tell the tale. Willo's narration, with misspellings and inventive phrasings, is a voice we have not heard before. Graphic violence occurs in several places, but Crockett's cold, brutal world is not without a few warm rooms where travelers can rest and prepare for the next challenge.-Maggie Knapp, Trinity Valley School, Fort Worth, TX (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this powerful first novel, global warming has killed the North Atlantic Current, sending the U.K. and much of the U.S. into a new ice age. Fifteen-year-old Willo-born in the barren, snow-covered mountains of northern Wales-has never known anything but the cold; half-feral, he barely listens when his father tells him stories of the times before the weather changed. Coming home from a day on the mountain, however, he finds his family has been taken away by government men. Then, heading back up the mountain, seeking refuge from the weather, cannibals, and feral dogs, Willo stumbles on two abandoned children. His first instinct is to "go quick away from those kids just standing all frozen and starving with their dark eyes begging me," but his basic humanity eventually intervenes. This brutal and at times terrifying postapocalyptic tale features a well-developed first-person narrator, strong secondary characters, and spare but compelling language. Despite its grim take on humanity's willingness to do evil, it also demonstrates that, even under the most straitened circumstances, people are capable of unexpected kindness and altruism. Ages 12-up. Agent: Greenhouse Literary Agency. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Fifteen-year-old Willo tires of the grown-ups' stories of "the old time, before the sea stop working, before the snow start to fall and fall and fall and don't stop." All he has ever known is this future ice-age world, and his family roughing it on the mountain. His trapping skills help with their survival, but one day he returns home to find his family gone, stranding him in the frozen mountains of Wales. He sets off toward the city in search of his family, meeting a thirteen-year-old girl named Mary on the way. Entering the city is like Dante's entering the gates of Hell. A sign daubed on a wall proclaims, "There is no law beyond / Do what thou wilt." But Willo doesn't abandon hope, and finds brief refuge with Piper, the rat man who recites Browning, and Jacob the furrier, who leads Willo toward news of his father. The strengths of the novel are Willo's distinctive first-person voice and the carefully delineated dystopian world, especially the hellish city with its slushy streets and foul air, gangs, dogs, soldiers, and fascist government in league with powerful business interests. Willo's oft-repeated slogans and parroting of his father's admonition to be a "beacon of hope" wear thin, but allusions to Yeats and Genesis and Browning and various fairy tales lend epic weight to Willo's journey in this absorbing first novel. dean schneider (c) Copyright 2012. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
People barely remember the time before the new Ice Age. Now, punishing snow is a year-round occurrence, and 15-year-old Willo and his family scrape out a living in the wilderness, trapping animals for skins that they can then sell to what remains of the government. One day Willo's family vanishes, and so he starts toward the violent, miserable, beggar-filled city to find them. Along the way he runs across a freezing little girl and decides to save her despite the advice of the dog, an imaginary companion who offers cold, survivalist advice from the dog skull Willo keeps lashed to his hat. At its best, this bleak debut recalls Patrick Ness' The Knife of Never Letting Go (2008) and Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), with the brave young narrator navigating the horrors of a wasted world in broken English ( she look like a worm do ). There is a staginess to the ending that feels incongruous with the naturalistic style of the rest of the book, but nevertheless this marks Crockett as a writer to watch.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD Willo was born after the onset of a new ice age that has left Europe in winter's grip in S.D. Crockett's atmospheric first novel, "After the Snow," a post-apocalyptic thriller for the post-global-warming era. A strong survivor, he lives with his family of "stragglers" in the hills outside the city. He wears a coat of hand-stitched skins and a dog skull as a fierce kind of hat, and when his family is taken away by the government, he goes out in search of them, following the voice of a dog inside his head. Traveling across a harsh, cold, snowcovered terrain filled with wild packs of dogs, Willo heads into the city, a bleak realm of starvation and violence. Along the way, he falls for a girl and discovers his family secrets, as well as the deep truth of who he is and where he belongs. Willo tells this dark story in a heavy, coarse, broken, but often beautiful dialect: "People always looking to find the runt in you and needle it out if they can." It's hard not to wonder at first whether Willo is perhaps a little slow or unbalanced. If so, he's also gifted - not only in snaring wild game ("Gonna want to show him something clever you done, like catching a big hare"), but also in his keen observation - and he is a deeply lovable character. Crockett has created a voice that gets inside you, a voice that, though limited in vocabulary and perspective, achieves remarkable emotional range. And Willo proves the perfect narrator for this harrowing tale about the dangerous new world of Crockett's invention. Her world, however, may vex some readers. We're told that this is the future, that global warming had, in fact, begun, but then snow started to fall. Yet the detritus of the world as we know it is largely absent. People aren't, for example, stripping computers for parts. They wear rags on their feet instead of - why not? - rubber from tires of useless cars. Where are all the old cars? Or the McDonald's signs and aluminum cans? Despite brief references to oil shortages, wind farms and solar power, the book doesn't pick up those burdens on the ground, and includes only a few signs (like a passing reference to "Star Wars") of our familiar surroundings. "After the Snow" doesn't seem to truly be set in either the future or in some alternate past, instead residing almost entirely outside time. But readers who get bogged down with questions about computers and McDonald's are going to miss out on a wonderful story - one that wobbles a little in the final third but comes to a beautiful ending. And Crockett's avoidance of the contemporary world gives her a powerful advantage. "After the Snow" isn't cautionary, as so many dystopian novels are, about a current hot-button issue. Crockett doesn't tease out societal or political trends to spell our doom. Readers who dig for these will find a number of threads, but the novel untethers them again and again. Instead of being political, the story Crockett tells is a deeply human one of survival and self-discovery. "After the Snow" is a coming-of-age novel, first and foremost - a brutal, tough and sometimes truly transcendent one. Julianna Baggott, who also writes under the names Bridget Asher and N. E. Bode, is the author of "The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted" and "The Anybodies" trilogy. Her new novel, "Pure," was published last month.