Book Review: The Children’s Blizzard by Melanie Benjamin

When stupid people do stupid things.

The Children’s Blizzard by Melanie Benjamin. Narrated by Cassandra Campbell. Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group, 2021. 11 hours (approx.).

Melanie Benjamin’s The Aviator’s Wife made the New York Times bestseller list in both hardcover and paperback. Perhaps I should have read that novel because her latest, The Children’s Blizzard, is literary garbage. To be specific, it fails to persuade the reader to emotionally invest in its characters.

The book is about a blizzard that took place in January of 1888. It is sometimes called the children’s blizzard because many students died on their way home from school. The best scenes in this novel are the ones in which the students and their teachers struggle against the elements. These scenes actual mange to elicit some sympathy.

Gerda Olsen is a young teacher who must get two students through the blizzard to the safety of her home. Failing to do this, she shelters them and herself in a haystack. She places the two sleeping children inside, but it is apparent to the reader that they are dead.

Gerda’s sister, Raina, is in the same predicament but with 10 students rather than two. She must get them across a creek on a narrow log while the wind whips at the students, some as young as 7. One falls into the frigid water and later would lose her toes.

However, for most of the novel there is little sympathy for the characters. In part this is because there are so many, and Benjamin jumps between them. The larger problem is their stupidity. They are stupid people doing stupid things.

The titular blizzard happened on the afternoon of January 12th, 1888. It was preceded by five days of snow and temperatures as low as -6℉ (Wikipedia). Later, temperatures would drop to between -20 to -40℉. But - and this is crucial to the plot - on the morning of January 12th temperatures had increased by 20 or 40 degrees. The unseasonably warm weather that morning prompted parents to send their children to school without coats.

Let’s put this into perspective. It’s January. The prairie is covered in snow. The highest temperatures are possibly 46℉ but this is probably not typical. Omaha, Nebraska, for example, only read 28℉. So I ask, “Why in the hell would parents send their kids to school without coats?”

Now let’s contrast this with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter, which is also a novel based on Wilder’s real life experience in South Dakota during the 1880-81 winter. On a warm day Laura begs her mother to let her go without her woolen underclothes. Ma says no because one is supposed to dress for the season, not the weather of the day (The Lois Level). Imagine that! Some bloody common sense. If only someone was this smart in The Children’s Blizzard.

Moreover, the schools run out of firewood. Perhaps they exhausted their stores in the preceding days. Fair enough. But no one thought to make use of the warm, clear weather to chop more? The children’s blizzard may have been unpredictable but surely the characters knew freezing temperatures would return. After all, it was the middle of January.

Benjamin’s book draws on historical people. Gerda Olsen, for example, is based on Lois Royce who, in fact, ran out of heating fuel and attempted to lead two kids to shelter (Wikipedia). But Benjamin isn’t writing a history book. She’s writing a novel. What happens in real life doesn’t always make for a great story.

That the characters were so foolish made them unlikable for me. But there are other problems with this book.

First, it is lacking a proper story arch. The major conflict might have been between the Olsen sisters. While both faced similar circumstances, Raina’s decisions made her a hero while Gerda’s made her a pariah. But nothing comes of it. The sisters make up and that’s that. 

The town folk effectively run Gerda out, but we are told this, not shown. Moreover, this event seems tacked on as an afterthought, and as a result it lacks any emotional weight. 

The closest we get to a story arch is the redemption of Gavin Woodson. Yet, the narrator seems to go out of her way to humiliate him.

Second, the characters are two-dimensional. The real life owner of the local newspaper is a sociopath. So, too, is Anna Pedersen who decides to murder another character on a feeling of mistrust after less than 12 hours of acquaintanceship. Entire novels - BIG novels - have been written on whether or not murder can be justified. In The Children’s Blizzard the justification is taken for granted.

And then there is Ollie. Poor Ollie! Not satisfied with just two dimensions, Benjamin crushes him into a singularity. He is black. He is in the novel to be black and confront the racism associated with that. Yet, his great epiphany - that black children should be taught by black teachers - is racist segregation. 

I can’t shake the feeling that Benjamin is using Ollie as a mouthpiece for her own ideology. Segregation had made a comeback in Progressive circles around the time this book was probably written (example here). Perhaps Benjamin intended to give Ollie thoughts of his own, to make him his own person. If that is the case, it’s the only example of such a thing in The Children’s Blizzard.

---