As Simple as Snow - Softcover

Galloway, Gregory

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425207803 ISBN 13: 9780425207802

Publisher: Berkley, 2006

Synopsis

"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."

Anna—who prefers to be called Anastasia—is a slightly spooky and complicated high school girl with a penchant for riddles, Houdini tricks, and ghost stories. She spends much of her time writing obituaries for every living person in town. She is unlike anyone the narrator has ever known, and they make an unlikely, though happy, pair.

Then a week before Valentine's Day, Anna disappears, leaving behind only a dress placed neatly near a hole in the frozen river, and a string of unanswered questions. Desperate to find her, or at least to comprehend what happened and why, the narrator begins to reconstruct the past five months. And soon the fragments of curious events, intimate conversations, secrets, and peculiar letters (and the anonymous messages that continue to arrive) coalesce into haunting and surprising revelations that may implicate friends, relatives, and even Anna herself.

About this title

About the Author:

Gregory Galloway has an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He lives in New Jersey.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Berkley
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0425207803
• ISBN 13: 9780425207802
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 308