Overview
Kate Sterling has lost four years of her life to grief and anger. Zeke Dexter has lost four years of his life as well — in jail for the accident that killed Kate's mother. Just out of prison, Zeke wants to put the past behind him, but a freak blizzard makes him a prisoner once again — he of Kate, and Kate of him.
Kate fears she will never be able to overcome the anger that has consumed her since her mother's death. But is Zeke the only one Kate needs to forgive?
In March of 1941, when a severe blizzard suddenly hits Bismarck, North Dakota, a girl trying to save her stranded father and brother inadvertently helps the man who killed her mother four years before.
Synopsis
Kate Sterling has lost four years of her life to grief and anger. Zeke Dexter has lost four years of his life as well — in jail for the accident that killed Kate's mother. Just out of prison, Zeke wants to put the past behind him, but a freak blizzard makes him a prisoner once again — he of Kate, and Kate of him.
Kate fears she will never be able to overcome the anger that has consumed her since her mother's death. But is Zeke the only one Kate needs to forgive?
Publishers Weekly
In this taut novel set in 1941 North Dakota, Naylor (Shiloh; the Alice books) brings together a number of freak occurrences-and joins them so skillfully that her story pulses with drama. Separate narrative strands introduce Kate Sterling, a teenager still mourning the death of her mother, Ann, four years earlier, and Zeke Dexter, the drunk driver who killed Ann Sterling and who has just been released from prison a year early, for good behavior. Naylor creates a highly charged atmosphere right from the beginning, as Kate feigns an interest in high school life while secretly consumed with hatred for Zeke. When an unusually severe blizzard strikes (the storm is historical), Kate, alone at home and realizing that her father, a country doctor, and younger brother are stranded just yards away in an unheated car, resourcefully plans a rescue. Meanwhile, Zeke, lost in the blinding snowfall, has stumbled, frost-bitten, into the Sterlings' car and is being tended by Doc Sterling. Kate, who has long fantasized about making Zeke suffer, is shocked. Naylor doesn't shy away from Kate's darkest feelings (assisting her father in a makeshift operation, for example, Kate administers Zeke's ether and must resist her urge to give him too much-or too little). As unlikely as the plot sounds, the believability of the characters and the complexity of their emotions give the novel psychological truth and strong resonance to its protagonists' slow movement toward forgiveness. Ages 12-up. (Oct.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
In this taut novel set in 1941 North Dakota, Naylor (Shiloh; the Alice books) brings together a number of freak occurrences-and joins them so skillfully that her story pulses with drama. Separate narrative strands introduce Kate Sterling, a teenager still mourning the death of her mother, Ann, four years earlier, and Zeke Dexter, the drunk driver who killed Ann Sterling and who has just been released from prison a year early, for good behavior. Naylor creates a highly charged atmosphere right from the beginning, as Kate feigns an interest in high school life while secretly consumed with hatred for Zeke. When an unusually severe blizzard strikes (the storm is historical), Kate, alone at home and realizing that her father, a country doctor, and younger brother are stranded just yards away in an unheated car, resourcefully plans a rescue. Meanwhile, Zeke, lost in the blinding snowfall, has stumbled, frost-bitten, into the Sterlings' car and is being tended by Doc Sterling. Kate, who has long fantasized about making Zeke suffer, is shocked. Naylor doesn't shy away from Kate's darkest feelings (assisting her father in a makeshift operation, for example, Kate administers Zeke's ether and must resist her urge to give him too much-or too little). As unlikely as the plot sounds, the believability of the characters and the complexity of their emotions give the novel psychological truth and strong resonance to its protagonists' slow movement toward forgiveness. Ages 12-up. (Oct.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.KLIATT
To quote from the review of the hardcover in KLIATT, November 2002: Fifteen-year-old Kate Sterling lives outside of Grand Forks, North Dakota, in March 1941. Across the ocean the world is warring, in the unseasonably warm air a blizzard is lurking, and in Kate's heart the hatred she feels toward the drunk driver who took her mother's life is boiling. Meanwhile, the driver, Zeke Dexter, has just completed his prison term and is coming back home to the only family he has left. In alternating chapters, Naylor brings these two characters closer and closer until, in an ironic twist of fate, they are trapped with Kate's father and brother by the Red River Valley Blizzard of '41, which almost kills them all. Naylor's description allows the reader to experience the blizzard's suffocating white power. While they wait for the plows to reach their rural home, Kate struggles to control her violent feelings toward Zeke in the face of his remorse and her father's compassion for him. Even her younger brother moves beyond his own pain to befriend the man who has killed his mother. When injury confines Zeke to her home even longer, Kate comes to realize she is destroying herself through her hatred, and that only forgiveness will begin her healing process. KLIATT Codes: JS—Recommended for junior and senior high school students. 2002, Simon & Schuster, Pulse, 231p., Ages 12 to 18.—Michele Winship