The Snow Train

by Joseph Cummins

A chronicle of one small boy's horribly disfiguring and mysteriously transfiguring disease. Told through Robbie O'Conor's perspective, it catches the tone of a child who cannot comprehend the forces that shape his life, yet manages to convey the brute reality of those forces with consummate maturity. By turns intimate, imaginative and in the final conclusion, blissful.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1888451238
• ISBN13: 9781888451238
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Akashic Books
• Length: 290 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.1" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

One of the best books I have ever read

Loved it. Wonderful charecters, an awsome plot, and filled with feeling. I didn't want to put it down, and didn't until I had finished it...and then wanted to read it again. I'm buying another copy because my first one is showing wear! A must read.

A haunting book that lingers long after the ending

I am an avid reader yet I don't think I have ever written a review but this book will not stop haunting me. I cried reading the last three chapters. It left me raw like Robbie's skin condition. I felt sometimes like I was next to Robbie and more often that I was Robbie. I do not think I can find the right words to express how well Joseph Cummins captures the voice and nuances of the child as he leads the reader by the hand through his world. There is a quality in this novel that is reminiscent of the way James Agee wrote A Death in the Family. Like Agee, Cummins drags you inside Robbie and his world.

An adventurous voice that doesn't get snowed under

Anyone who approaches this novel without great skepticism hasn't considered the unforgiving challenges that confronted its author. For starters, Mr. Cummins had to write in the "voice" of an infant. This undertaking not only smacks of gimmickry, but conjures up embarrassing images of a rapt uncle goo-gooing to his baby niece. No less thorny was the author's decision to plague his pint-sized protagonist with a ghastly skin disorder, a condition which must rest somewhere between single and double amputee on the list of appealing fictive characteristics. Finally, Mr. Cummins set his novel in the 1950s, a period which few writers can revisit without revising. But The Snow Train handles both the tyke and Ike years of its hero and setting without leaving readers lost in a field of corniness: Robbie's playmates, like his parents' martinis, are a blessing waiting to bite; the solitude that frees him from bullying also drags him into deepest loneliness. But for all its freakish scabs and bitter frosts, this book possesses charm and warmth. Mr. Cummins tells his story with a flinty lyricism--a fixation on the mysteries of childhood and weather as imagined by a good Irishman and translated into the close and precise prose of a good American. Humorous and disturbing, sensuous and daring, realistic and fantastic, The Snow Train results from an almost spiritual and philosophical concentration on what it means to be a child. I realized this shortly after beginning the novel, when I began to see things freshly, strangely; it took me a while to grasp that I was hearing fellow adults and seeing autumn leaves from the vantage of Robbie. I'll most certainly measure future reads against this book.

worth the wait

I won't be coy and disguise myself here . . .I've been a colleague of Joe's for more than ten years, when he started writing The Snow Train. This book is his heart and soul, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that it moved me immeasurably. To hear about a book for a decade, and then to finally read it -- and know that the rest of the world can now, too -- is probably something I'll never experience again. I want to use words like "page-turning," "tear-inducing," "touching," "emotionally charged" and "awesome," as all readers will, but the phrase that encapsulates my true feelings about The Snow Train is: "as close to perfect as a first novel can get."Way to go, Joe!