As Simple as Snow

by Gregory Galloway

Overview

Anna—who prefers to be called Anastasia—is a spooky and complicated high school girl with a penchant for riddles, Houdini tricks, and ghost stories. She is unlike anyone the narrator has ever known, and they make an unlikely, though happy, pair. Then Anna disappears, leaving behind only a dress near a hole in the frozen river, and a string of unanswered questions. Desperate to find out what happened the narrator begins to reconstruct the past five months. And soon the fragments of curious events, intimate conversations, secrets, letters—and the anonymous messages that continue to arrive—coalesce into haunting and surprising revelations that may implicate friends, relatives, and even Anna herself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780698405981
Publisher:	Penguin Young Readers Group
Publication date:	04/21/2015
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	14 - 17 Years

About the Author

Gregory Galloway received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the author of As Simple as Snow, winner of the Alex Award, and The 39 Deaths of Adam Strand.

Read an Excerpt

Good-bye to Everyone

Anna Cayne had moved here in August, just before our sophomore year in high school, but by February she had, one by one, killed everyone in town. She didn't do it all by herself--I helped with a few, including my best friend--but still, it was no small accomplishment, even if it was a small town.
  She captured all of these lives and deaths in fourteen black-jacketed composition notebooks. By the time she has finished, there were more than 1,500 obituaries, on just under 2,800 handwritten pages. The lives she wrote about were real, all true, but the deaths were fictions she invented, an average of around eight a day. "I'm not predicting the future," she said, "but it's only a matter of time before everyone catches up to me."
  She had known things about people, or had discovered them--the secrets and private information that showed up in her notebooks were things that people who had spent their entire lives in our town didn't know. The funny thing is, during the months when the bodies were piling up in the imagination of Anna Cayne, I don't think a single person actually died in town; it was the longest drought for the funeral home that anyone could remember.
  The obituaries were private; her friends and a few other people knew that Anna was working on them, but besides me, I don't believe anyone else was allowed to read them. She must have started the project on her very first day in town, the day I saw her sitting on the front lawn of her new home, writing in one of her notebooks as the rest of us stood with her parents, watching their belongings parade from thelong yellow truck into the house. And after she had written the last page almost seven months later, she was gone.
  Maybe.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This strange tale manages to creep under your skin, and to stay there for some time."—People

"The writing is compelling; the pace as swift as that water churning under the ice."—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

"A story about young love, suffused with mystery and magic . . . an absorbing read."—The Des Moines Register

"This rich, complex puzzle is the work of a talented author."—Publishers Weekly

"An intriguing debut."—School Library Journal

"Oddly mesmerizing . . . it's teasing foreshadowings and forbodings make it hard to forget."—Booklist

"Galloway does an excellent job of building suspense."—Library Journal

"One of the best books I've read in a long, long time."-Kaye Gibbons

Editorial Reviews

Engagingly written debut about a mysterious teenage girl's disappearance, and more's the pity: if Galloway were less sure and fluent, readers would be less likely to jump through his hoops before realizing he didn't know why they were doing it, either. Anastasia (Anna) Cayne transfers to Hamilton High and hangs out with the Goths, but the story's unnamed narrator-boyfriend (an angsty teenager down on hypocrisy, we'll call him Holden for convenience) discovers that the only resemblance between the Goths and Anna is the black mascara they both wear. Anna is accessorized with-if not completely composed of-a full set of cool outsider cultural tics. She spends her time writing fanciful obituaries for everyone in town; she introduces boyfriend Holden to Houdini, Poe, Rimbaud, Lovecraft, and Ambrose Bierce; plays him indie-rock music and shortwave broadcasts of mysterious counting voices; sends him messages in code, mysterious phrases, puzzles, and maps. Much remains unexplained about her even as she makes The Spooky and Unexplained part of Holden's life. Where did her bruises come from? Why doesn't her father have eyebrows? What was Anna's involvement in the car crash of loutish alpha Goth, Bryce? Why doesn't she like Mr. Devon, Holden's favorite teacher? When Anna disappears, her dress neatly laid out beside a hole in an ice-covered river, even more questions arise. Why was there a condom wrapper under Anna's couch, when Holden knew he'd disposed of his? Is Anna dead? Is she sending him messages, or is that just wishful thinking? Are the messages from the other side, or just from another town? Where did Holden's drug-dealing best friend go for two weeks? Why did Mr. Devon lie about where he'smoving? Did the TV psychic really contact Anna? Who knows? And who cares? Like the puzzles and codes Anna sends, the questions either go unresolved, or if answered, lead nowhere. A pointless exercise that might work for the "I challenge you with my shocking style" YA crowd.

Kirkus Reviews

"This strange tale manages to creep under your skin, and to stay there for some time."—People

"The writing is compelling; the pace as swift as that water churning under the ice."—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

"A story about young love, suffused with mystery and magic . . . an absorbing read."—The Des Moines Register

"This rich, complex puzzle is the work of a talented author."—Publishers Weekly

"An intriguing debut."—School Library Journal

"Oddly mesmerizing . . . it's teasing foreshadowings and forbodings make it hard to forget."—Booklist

"Galloway does an excellent job of building suspense."—Library Journal

"One of the best books I've read in a long, long time."-Kaye Gibbons

From the Publisher