Janis Daly's Reviews > The Children's Blizzard

I will never forget the February day in 1978 when my Boston-area school released us early as an impeding blizzard forecast hit the principal’s office. Since it was February in New England, we bundled into the winter coats, hats, mittens, and scarves stored in lockers and coat rooms. Beneath down hooded parkas, most of the girls probably wore the popular look of the time: a turtleneck with a popped polo shirt collar and topped with a Fair Isle sweater. While there may have been Nikes with the original red swoosh on our feet, there were also most likely a fair number of Timberland boots on the guys. We climbed onto buses which blew hot air through the vents and made the two-mile trip home slower than usual, but we made it in time to hole up with our families and wait out the storm. My parents made it home from work early, too. And so, we sat in our living room with the furnace cranking and lights glowing as the snow fell and the drifts mounted. The next morning, we dug a path from the front door for our cat to get outside. Two days later, we walked a mile on snow-covered empty streets to gaze out from the nearby major highway overpass to see the roofs of over 3,000 cars and 500 trucks stuck on both sides of the highway. The Catholic church at the exit ramp sheltered many who escaped from their cars and made it to the Church. Fourteen others, however, perished in their cars from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Comparing my blizzard experience with the families of Nebraska and South Dakota in 1888 is impossible. Melanie Benjamin writes of the immensity and tragedies which transpired during those dark days in January in her newest historical fiction, The Children’s Blizzard. Based on accounts from survivors, Benjamin crafts imagined characters who battle the ferocity of the storm with triumphant survivals and agonizing defeats. At the core of the story’s heart is 16-year-old Raina Olsen, a Nebraska schoolteacher in charge of a one-room schoolhouse and its young students. There are no down hooded parkas to bundle the children into. There are no heated buses to deliver them home to their waiting parents. There is only Raina and a 15-year-old student, Tor, to shepherd the children to safety. Or at least the ones who didn’t head out on their own, walking blind into a maelstrom, like 10-year-old Anette Pederson and her friend, Fredrick.

From the sting of pelting pebbles of snow on your neck to the seep of icy slush sloshing your boots to freeze your toes, I wonder if Benjamin stood outside in a blizzard to capture every sense of hopelessness and loss. Her vivid descriptions, physical and emotional, tease a reader’s guilt of having so much in light of those who had so little. Other characters and plotlines fill the pages for additional POVs, which mostly add color and contrast to the story. Raina’s sister, Gerda in the Dakota territory, also a schoolteacher, endures the storm with a vastly different outcome. Gavin Woodson, a reporter banished from New York, travels the area in the aftermath to discover and share the survivors’ stories. Raina, Anette and Gavin intersect to provide tidy outcomes for the story’s end.

Benjamin also provides a commentary on the role of the news media in shaping and driving a population’s actions and choices. Immigrants settled the Great Plains drawn by the allure of free homesteads and land to plant and reap their dreams. An unforgiving climate, however, can murder those dreams in an instant, whether it’s prairie fires, flash floods, or blizzards. Only the strong in heart, mind, soul, and body can survive.

I finished the book with a couple of plot questions. I think they could have been omitted or resolved differently for a reader to completely bond with each character. Overall, I enjoyed learning about another lesser known piece of history in a lesser represented part of the country, the Great and Mighty Plains of the United States.

I received an advance reader copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

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