Whiter Than Snow
Sandra Dallas, 2010
St. Martin's Press
292 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312600150
Summary
A moving and powerful story of a small town after a devastating avalanche, and the life changing effects it has on the people who live there
Whiter Than Snow opens in 1920, on a spring afternoon in Swandyke, a small town near Colorado’s Tenmile Range. Just moments after four o’clock, a large split of snow separates from Jubilee Mountain high above the tiny hamlet and hurtles down the rocky slope, enveloping everything in its path including nine young children who are walking home from school. But only four children survive.
Whiter Than Snow takes you into the lives of each of these families: There’s Lucy and Dolly Patch—two sisters, long estranged by a shocking betrayal. Joe Cobb, Swandyke’s only black resident, whose love for his daughter Jane forces him to flee Alabama. There’s Grace Foote, who hides secrets and scandal that belies her genteel façade. And Minder Evans, a civil war veteran who considers his cowardice his greatest sin. Finally, there’s Essie Snowball, born Esther Schnable to conservative Jewish parents, but who now works as a prostitute and hides her child’s parentage from all the world.
Ultimately, each story serves as an allegory to the greater theme of the novel by echoing that fate, chance, and perhaps even divine providence, are all woven into the fabric of everyday life. And it’s through each character’s defining moment in his or her past that the reader understands how each child has become its parent’s purpose for living. In the end, it’s a novel of forgiveness, redemption, survival, faith and family. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 11, 1939
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.A., University of Denver
• Awards—numerous, see below
• Currently—lives in Denver, Colorado, USA
Award-winning author Sandra Dallas was dubbed “a quintessential American voice” by Jane Smiley, in Vogue magazine. Sandra’s novels with their themes of loyalty, friendship, and human dignity have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and have been optioned for films.
A journalism graduate of the University of Denver, Sandra began her writing career as a reporter with Business Week. A staff member for twenty-five years (and the magazine’s first female bureau chief,) she covered the Rocky Mountain region, writing about everything from penny-stock scandals to hard-rock mining, western energy development to contemporary polygamy. Many of her experiences have been incorporated into her novels.
While a reporter, she began writing the first of ten nonfiction books. They include Sacred Paint, which won the National Cowboy Hall of Fame Western Heritage Wrangler Award, and The Quilt That Walked to Golden, recipient of the Independent Publishers Assn. Benjamin Franklin Award.
Turning to fiction in 1990, Sandra has published eight novels. She is the recipient of the Women Writing the West Willa Award for New Mercies, and two-time winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award, for The Chili Queen and Tallgrass. In addition, she was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, the Mountain and Plains Booksellers Assn. Award, and a four-time finalist for the Women Writing the West Willa Award.
The mother of two daughters—Dana is an attorney in New Orleans and Povy is a photographer in Golden, Colorado— Sandra lives in Denver with her husband, Bob.
Her Own Words:
• Because of my interest in the West—I wrote nine nonfiction books about the West before I turned to fiction—I’m a sucker for women’s journals of the westward movement. I wanted The Diary of Mattie Spenser to have the elements of a novel but to read as much like a 19th century journal as possible. Mattie is a woman of her time, not a current-day heroine dressed in a long skirt, and the language is faithful to the Civil War era.
• I added dialogue to keep the diary entries from being too stilted for contemporary readers. Making the diary believable has had an unforeseen consequence: Many readers believe it is an actual journal. They’ve asked where the diary is kept and what happened to the characters after the journal ended. One reader accused me of rewriting some of Mattie’s entries because she recognized my style. Another sent me a copy of an early Denver photograph, asking if the man in the picture was one of the characters in the book. (Author bio from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
In this stilted, disjointed smalltown disaster drama, a 1920 Colorado avalanche traps nine children in a snow drift, turning their close-knit community upside-down in the process. As the children's families learn of their predicament, the complicated backstories that bind the members of sleepy Swandyke come to light; in the present, the developing tragedy, including multiple deaths, transforms the community through sorrow, forgiveness, and redemption. Unfortunately, novelist Dallas (Prayers for Sale) isn't up to the challenge of multiple plot threads, a large cast of characters, or the heavily loaded children-in-distress material; exaggerated caricature, stiff dialogue, and poorly integrated character history make for awkward, disappointing melodrama.
Publishers Weekly
Dallas is well known for her storytelling abilities, but this reads more like a valediction of a time and place faded from memory than her usual vibrant, visceral tale. Still, Dallas is a magnet. —Lynne Welch
Booklist
Dallas (Prayers for Sale, 2009, etc.) centers her eighth novel around an avalanche that strikes the mining town of Swandyke, Colo., in the 1920s, trapping nine young children under the snow. By the end of the first chapter readers know the names of the children and that only four will survive, but Dallas's interest lies with their parents. There are sisters Lucy and Dolly. Dolly stole Lucy's fiance years ago, and Lucy, though married to a man who makes her happy, has never forgiven Dolly. Then there is Grace, the wife of the mine superintendent. After her father lost the family fortune, Grace seduced her husband into marriage out of the mistaken fear she was pregnant with another man's child. Unable to fit in with the local women, she's become a lonely neurotic. The only black man in Swandyke and a single father to his daughter, Joe tries to keep a low profile since running away from Alabama after he hit the white doctor who caused his wife's death. Septuagenarian Minder Evans is raising his orphaned grandson. A Civil War vet, Minder's guilt over letting his best friend die has left him a bitter loner. Finally there is Essie, the prostitute whose secrets include her Jewish background and her daughter, being raised by another woman until Essie can pull together enough money to leave the whorehouse. The avalanche story does not pick up again until the seventh chapter, when Grace witnesses the snow slide and alerts the town. As the digging out begins, and even after the surviving children are identified, the novel remains focused on how the tragedy redeems the adults' lives. The sisters reunite. Grace finds her place in the community and becomes a novelist. Minder reaches out both to Essie,who leaves prostitution to care for him, and Joe, whose suicide he prevents. Dallas lays on the sentimentality (and Christian overtones), but her sense of time and place is pitch perfect and her affection for her characters infectious.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Why does Lucy hate Swandyke, while her sister Dolly loves it? What do the mountains represent to each girl? Why did Lucy miss Dolly more than Ted during the women’s estrangement?
2. Emancipation did not end prejudice against African Americans, and in many cases, their treatment was worse after freedom. Compare the lives of men during slavery with Joe’s life as a post-Civil War black man. How was it better and worse? When did the attitude toward blacks change, and what brought about that change?
3. Why was Grace so anxious to find a husband after she discovered her family’s fortune was gone? Did she have options other than marriage? Compare her life with Jim with what it would have been if she’d married George.
4. Should Minder have tried to save Billy Boy, even though both men would have drowned? Why didn’t Minder identify himself to Kate when he encountered her in Fort Madison? Should he have done so?
5. What made Esther more ambitious than her sister? What alternative did she have to becoming a prostitute? Does she have a future in Swandyke? Will the townspeople ever forget she was a hooker?
6. Which character in the book did you relate to most, and why?
7. You knew from the outset that only four of the nine children caught in the avalanche would live. Which ones would you have saved?
8. If an avalanche took place in a small mountain town today, how would the residents’ reactions differ from those of the townspeople in Swandyke in 1920? How would they be the same?
9. Why does tragedy bring people together? How did it change the characters in Whiter Than Snow? And how does it change people in general?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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