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Readers of HOUSE UNDER SNOW won't be surprised to learn that author Jill Bialosky is a poet. Her prose is elegant. It rings in your ears long after you've closed the book cover. The story, which details the life of a young girl struggling to find herself in a house with two sisters and a widowed mother, is well paced, carefully planned, expertly executed.
Initially readers accustomed to over-written prose may stumble on the gentle word choices, the subtle nuances employed by this author. They may question the audible distance created between the main characters and the reader. But patience is rewarded. A story that operates on many planes, HOUSE UNDER SNOW explores the relationships that women develop, inherit and pass on to their children. It prompts readers --- both men and women --- to pause and question, even examine the role to which they were born. Alternating between an adolescent Anna and her younger naïve self, Bialosky delivers a clean, clear description of a house where death has taken its toll and continues to haunt the lives of its inhabitants. "...our house was always in a state of winter, waiting for someone to dig us out. Ours was like a house under snow, frozen since the day our father died."
The ghosts that encircle the house in Chagrin Falls, Ohio are not only of a father who fell while tending to the gazebo but also of family members --- survivors of the Holocaust, of a young wife and mother ripe with sensuality, of three young daughters safe in a father's cocoon. They speak in whispers that rival the voices of Anna, her mother Lilly, and her two sisters. They challenge the men who tromp through the house, traipsing into the lives of one man's family, trampling on the female semicircle created in the absence of the one man who made their lives whole.
The pages slip by quickly as the pieces fall into place in this sad tale told in a dry, unknowing --- yet wise --- voice of a teenager. From the first chapter, readers discover that Anna returns home to Chagrin Falls to organize her wedding. So from the very first, readers are assured that Anna comes into her own and lives a life free from the responsibilities she shouldered as a child. The following 241 pages fill in the gaps and shed light on the in-between --- from where she is now and how she got there. The heartbreak of first love, the longing for normalcy, and the burden of family ties all play a part of Anna's young life and create the basis for HOUSE UNDER SNOW, a story that you will read once and remember always.
--- Reviewed by Heather Grimshaw
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