Light on Snow by Anita Shreve

I had never heard of Anita Shreve before, but when I told my mother I was reading this book, she immediately gave me another of Shreve's books to read. It turns out that she is a wonderful novelist! 

My husband, Jonah, picked this book up at Goodwill while he was looking for fishing books; he thought it would be a good one to add to my classroom library. Wow, was he right!

This book is about a twelve year-old girl and her father who, during a walk on their twenty acres of woods behind their secluded New Hampshire home, find a baby who has been left in the snow, wrapped in a sleeping bag. The idea sounded pretty interesting to me, but the way that the story develops is intense. The reader learns early in the novel that the main character herself has lost important family members, and the baby that she and her father find cause their relationship and the way they have been dealing with their loss to change drastically.

I was a bit concerned about reading a story told from a twelve-year-old's perspective (since I am thirty-two and find it hard to read young adult literature at times), but there is something about they way that Shreve writes that is so authentic yet mature that allowed be to connect immediately to the main character. She is so believable and realistic, and the story was such a good one that kept developing in layers that I did not want to put the book down until I finished it. I had been looking for a book like this for a while, and I'm so glad that my husband found it for me!