Adult male narrator recalls the bitter separation of his parents and also the murder of his former baby-sitter. I love O'Nan's style which is beautifully straight-forward. You can definitely relate to the people and places he creates. ( )

Connections. Arthur is fourteen when he learns that his former babysitter has been killed. Only years later does he look back at this time and put some pieces together.

He had loved his babysitter, Annie, when he was young, and as a young teen the feelings were still there when he learns that Annie's toddler daughter has disappeared. He is in the high school band and the whole band is sent off to help with the search.

Annie had been struggling with her own problems, which is probably why she didn't think much about letting her little girl play in the snow alone. Having an affair with the husband of her best friend probably tops the list.

Arthur is just an observer. An aching, underachieving teen observer. Does his connection to Annie and what happens to her change him? ( )

I've read other books by this author and thought they were too harsh and dramatic. However, I couldn't put this one down. There is no doubt that O'Nan is an incredible author.

The setting is small town America. The winter climate in northern Pennsylvania is depressingly bitter cold. This is a story focusing on the mistakes made that end badly.

While practicing in the band, a young man hears a series of gunshots, coming from the woods near where the band is practicing. Learning that the person killed was previously his babysitter when his parents were married. As he witnesses the marriage spinning out of control, he learns his father has a lover. Living with his distraught mother who selfishly uses him as her counselor. Sadly, he is trying his best to handle both the death of someone he knew, and the nastiness swirling around him from the demise of his parent's marriage.

O'Nan then takes us inside another story of love gone wrong, and in vivid description tells the story of the man married to Anne (the babysitting of the young man,) and her husband Glenn. Dramatic, brutal, they separate but dance around trying to reunite. In the meantime, both find solace in the arms of others. Both Glen and Anne are tragic characters. Both depressed, and trying to hold onto a thread of something that they dream could work.

Their small daugther Tara sustains the brunt of Anne's inability to get her act together and tries to understand why her mother smacks her around so much.

One night, Tara walks away from the house after yet another smacking incident. As a frantic set of parents and a community strive to find the little girl through a bitter storm, it is the young man who heard the shots while practicing in the band., who finds the small child floating in a body of water. Her small bloated, dead, cold body is an image he holds and cannot release. Now, he wrestles with his family falling apart, and the murder of his previous babysitter.

O'Nan does an excellent job of weaving small-town, going no-where life and two sets of married people struggling to cope, and doing a very poor job of it all.

This is an incredibly well-written story of struggle and failure.

Highly recommended. I read it through the night. ( )

In Snow Angels Stewart O’Nan gives the reader an up close and personal look at small town America in 1974. He perfectly captures the dreariness of the early winter season and two separate stories unfold as fourteen year old Arthur Parkinson recalls this strange time when his former babysitter is murdered and his parents marriage fell apart. Arthur’s way of coping is to get stoned and burying himself in his music ignoring his parent’s acrimonious dealings with each other.

The story of Annie Marchand is a tragic one. She left her husband, engaged in a seedy affair with her best friend’s boyfriend and took her eyes off her young daughter at the wrong time. Her estranged husband had already attempted suicide and then turned to religion but when things turn really bad, he blames Annie and can’t seem to move on.

These two stories are delivered in a unique style with Arthur recalling his fourteenth year in a series of flashbacks, while Annie’s story is told in the present tense which gives it a strong impact. Snow Angels is an unsentimental yet compassionate story about flawed people caught up in events beyond their control, and, although rather depressing, kept this reader engaged throughout. ( )

Set in a small town in the early 1970s, this is the story of Arty Parkinson, his messed up mother and his sad father, and his former babysitter, Annie, with her ne'er do well husband Glenn and her boyfriend Brock (who was also the boyfriend of her best friend Barb until, well, until Annie and Brock took up out at Susan's no-tell motel on the edge of town). Not one of the characters is happy but they aren't supposed to be. They have little about which to be happy, I suppose: jobs they don't love, unfaithful partners, and boring forms of entertainment. Arty, who is 14, plays in the high school marching band. He and his friends ditch school to smoke weed, sneak beers from their parents' cupboards, and wonder why the adults are all so incompetent. It's not that Arty doesn't love his parents; he does, and he wishes they would get back together. But being 14 is what it is and O'Nan captures the ambivalence and moodiness, undergirded by need for love and approval, that is the hallmark of early adolescence. When Arty's former babysitter is murdered, the not-so-shiny innocence of his youth is further tarnished.

A small detail quibble is that the description of the cash register at the Burger Hut where Arty works after school is out of sync with 1974. I worked in a fast food restaurant in 1976 and the kind of register Arty describes with a shrug had not yet been invented. Otherwise, the writing is pedestrian and the story, which admittedly pulled me in such that I did want to know what happened next, is dismal without redemption. Stewart O'Nan is an above-average observer of human nature and intimate relationships but this novel fell short of his capacity. ( )