The Children’s Blizzard: A Novel

Don’t read this one if you don’t feel like having your guts ripped out. But in a good way?

In The Children’s Blizzard, Melanie Benjamin explores the little-known 1888 snowstorm that occurred on the Great Plains, trapping children and families, many of them immigrant homesteaders, in a horrific and fast-moving snowstorm of epic proportions.

A deceptively mild January morning caught too many of them unaware and by the time school let out in the afternoon, a rapidly approaching and unpredicted blizzard slammed into the Great Plains, where many children were preparing to go home from school. Schoolteachers, woefully unprepared and many only teenagers themselves, faced the impossible decision of keeping the children back and freezing to death before the storm ran out, or attempting to return home and getting lost along the way.

This incredible and heartbreaking novel follows two sisters, both schoolteachers, a journalist, and a girl who never expected to survive, as they navigate a world that is not kind to those who don’t belong to the official narrative. It celebrates the human spirit and shines a light on an event of history largely ignored because those most affected were deemed too poor to matter.