Light on Snow

Bestselling author Anita Shreve’s young adult novella Light on Snow (2006) explores the ways in which unprocessed grief can turn into a barrier preventing the mourner from experiencing life rather than simply trudging through it. Told through the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl whose isolated and emotionally frozen existence is shaken up by the rescue of a newborn, the novel addresses questions about what makes a family, the nature of moral and criminal guilt, and the problem of moving on after a tragedy.

The novella is written in the first person in the voice of thirty-year-old Nicky Dillon, who is reflecting back on what happened when she was twelve.

Nicky and her father, Robert, live in a small town in New Hampshire. Two years earlier, her mother and her three-year-old sister, Clara, died in a horrific car crash in Manhattan. In a desperate attempt to get away from his grief, Robert intentionally bought a small cabin in a remote and isolated place. He is still completely disconnected from being able to process what happened. Nicky gets the sense that they are no longer a family – just a part of one that used to exist.



One day in December, when Nicky and Robert are snowshoeing, they hear a small wail coming from behind a nearby motel. Assuming it’s an animal, they investigate, only to find a newborn baby left to die in a sleeping bag in the snow. Energized, they rush the baby to the hospital, their quick thinking averting another senseless death. The doctors revive the baby, and although she ends up losing several fingers and toes to frostbite, she is otherwise healthy and unharmed.

Robert is whisked away to the police station for questioning by the town sheriff, Warren, who is eager to get to the bottom of this nightmare. Who would leave abandon a newborn like this and why? After some time in the dreary police station, Robert is free to go home, and the baby is taken away to be cared for by the state.

The day shakes up Robert and Nicky’s dreary existence. Nicky begins imagining alternate versions of events where her mother is alive, where Clara is alive but stays three years old forever, or where they keep the baby they found. Couldn’t the newborn be a new Clara, she asks Robert, which forces them into a conversation about their loss and the way no new person could ever replace the ones that died. Fueled by a new feeling of purpose, Robert and Nicky keep tabs on the baby’s status, but since no one can identify baby Doris’s parents, she will end up in foster care.



A few weeks later, a young woman named Charlotte comes to their house supposedly to look at some furniture for sale. But soon it becomes clear that the nineteen-year-old Charlotte is the baby’s mother. Robert is horrified by what Charlotte has done – after all, she is a fugitive wanted for attempted murder. But Nicky, immediately connecting with the young woman, dissuades Robert from instantly calling the police even though this makes Robert an accomplice after the fact (or at least someone who is abetting a fugitive). When a freak snowstorm completely cuts off their cabin from the road, the trio has to coexist in the house, forming relationships that change all of them for good.

Charlotte explains that she never wanted her baby to die. While she was pregnant, her boyfriend, James, had been pressuring her to give up the baby for adoption; Charlotte felt she couldn’t break up with him because her family had already disowned her for becoming pregnant in the first place. She give birth in the motel room, passing out from exhaustion afterwards. While she was asleep, James took Doris outside and left her in the snow. Then, when Charlotte woke up, a sobbing James told her the baby had died right after birth and that he had disposed of the body – and then he immediately took off to go on a ski trip with his friends. As soon as Charlotte had learned what really happened, she became sick with grief and guilt. She reached out to the Dillons in order to have some connection to the baby, whom she obviously can’t see since she is on the lam. Nicky’s new impossible dream is for Charlotte to stay with them forever and for them to form a new family with her.

But soon the snow is cleared and the police can get to the Dillons’s cabin. Nicky is devastated that her new friend is being arrested for something she didn’t actually do, but Charlotte’s guilt has transformed into acceptance. She knows that she didn’t protect her baby enough, and that as a result, Doris almost died, so she is willing to face the consequences of her actions.



Just before Christmas, Nicky’s loving Grandma comes to the cabin to cook a festive meal for the three of them and generally makes everyone’s lives better. On Christmas Eve, Detective Warren takes Nicky and Robert to see that Doris is being cared for by a loving family.

Critics complain that the novella’s ending doesn’t actually wrap up the story, since we do not find out what happened to Charlotte, James, baby Doris, or even to Nicky in the intervening years between twelve and thirty. We do learn that Robert eventually found a new love. In general, the novella debuted to middling to negative reviews. As Julie Myerson puts it in The Guardian, “It totally lacks subtext. I was unchanged and unchallenged by it. It's as if Shreve has been reading a clutch of magazine articles about loss and grief and teenage pregnancy, and decided to hang a rather straightforward novel on them.”