Synopses & Reviews
Snowfall features another sharp-tongued, uncompromising heroine, Catania Olsen. She is the doctor for and spiritual guardian of a band of hunters who live at the edge of a great Wall of ice in what was once Colorado. In the country of the Trappers, books are hand-copied so that knowledge may be preserved, but the technology described in their precious pages is mostly lost to their fur-clad readers, despite Catania's attempts at scientific treatment and the Trappers' careful husbanding of ancient metal tools.
As a resurgent population moves west and north from the more settled places that had once been the Eastern Seaboard and Gulf Coast of the United States, they drive tribesmen-Cree, Arapaho, and more-before them. On the run and desperate to find new homes, the tribes slaughter entire populations to claim their lands. The Trappers are innocent of this until Jack Monroe, banished years before for murdering a fellow Trapper, arrives, urging them to flee their ancestral home, the Trappers do not listen until nearly too late, until the first enemy arrows have found their marks.
The southern flight of the surviving Trappers is a journey through time as well as space. From a frozen northland where summer lasts two chilly weeks through a burgeoning forest where the Trappers taste their first beef to a gulf coast where warm breezes carry exotic scents and sounds; from a primitive life of hunting and trapping to the luxurious Gardens, where people can still weave and make paper, to a bustling trade mart where man-beasts created by unnatural science tread the dirt streets, Catania is shocked to recognize that the proud Trappers have spent generations clinging to civilization with their fingernails.
The journey into the warm lands will change Doctor Catania Olsen, mind, heart, and soul. She will gain and lose a love, see great wisdom and greater folly, witness amazing miracles and terrifying science, and, most surprising to herself, become a mother. Finally, she will have to choose between her people and her freedom.
Review
"The author skillfully collects all the sights, sounds, smells, and instincts of a remote life on the Alaskan frontier and serves it to the reader on a silver platter." -
-Library Journal
"Smith creates a starkly dramatic odyssey that far outdistances the hands-off pieties of even the best nature writing. The novel, like its uncompromising heroine, stands alone-animal, spiritual, humorous, sharp-tongued. Smith's story inspires unsuspected sympathies for places few have ever been."--Publishers Weekly
Review
"A fascinating portrait of the Earth in the grip of a post-apocalyptic Ice Age."-
Seattle Post-Intelligencer"A strong plot, memorable characters and a setting both intelligently imagined and artfully invoked. The author recounts [events] with authority, elegance, and frequently poetic grace."-The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Synopsis
The Trappers, hunter-gatherers who live beside a mammoth wall of ice, have none of the wonders their carefully hand-copied, ancient Warm Times books describe, like cars, guns, or plows. When bloodthirsty invaders slaughter most of the tribe, a small band of survivors heads south, led by a man few of them trust. Holding the remnants of her people together is their doctor, Catania Olsen, whose ugliness has left her unmarried but whose medical skill has earned her people's respect.
The Trappers' hazardous trek takes them from their familiar frozen northland, where summer lasts two chilly weeks, through a burgeoning forest where people still know how to make paper, to a warm, bustling gulf coast trade mart where man-beasts created by unnatural science tread the dirt streets.
Journeying into the warm lands will change Catania, mind, heart, and soul. She will gain and lose a love, see great wisdom and greater folly, and become a mother. Finally, she will have to choose between her people and her freedom.
About the Author
Mitchell Smith is the author of critically-acclaimed novels of suspense, including Reprisal, Sacrifice, and Karma. His evocations of the natural world and of human nature, as in Due North, earned him a devoted readership. Smith has also written a trilogy of near-future, post-apocalpytic novels which illuminate what the Earth might be like after the next Ice