Suzanne Redfearn · 2020 · Novel
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Sixteen-year-old Finn Miller is heading to the mountains for a snowy ski weekend with her family, her best friend Mo, neighbours and a young man they stopped to help. Their overloaded camper goes off the road and tumbles down the mountainside, and Finn dies at once. Suspended between worlds, she watches the survivors fight the freezing cold and then struggle to live with what happened.
The novel follows both the ordeal and its long aftermath. Choices made in the cold, some brave and some questionable, leave people tormented by grief, guilt and blame. Finn’s father wants someone to pay, her mother is haunted by the decisions she made to save the others, and Mo searches for the truth as the story of their survival is retold.
Key insights
- A crisis compresses character into a few decisions; people who seem alike in ordinary life can act very differently when survival is at stake.
- Grief is not a single process. Each family member mourns differently, and those differences can drive people apart unless they are acknowledged.
- Blame can feel like relief from guilt, but the need to punish someone can trap the person seeking it as much as the target.
- The accepted story of an event can drift from what really happened, and insisting on the truth may come at a social cost.
- Forgiveness, of others and of oneself, appears as slow, deliberate work that lets survivors keep living rather than a single moment of release.
Read it if you like emotional family dramas about grief, survival and forgiveness, told by a narrator watching from beyond death.