David is part of a beautiful family - all of them key secondary characters that complete this story.ĭavid meets the new healer's assistant, Callan Landers, during a visit to the healer's house and they forge a bond through their love of reading and books.

When we first meet him, he's conflicted about his future and his straitlaced mother's plans to marry him off to the schoolteacher's daughter. In Day's world, as in olden times, when David turns 18 he'll be considered a man in his community. David is the son of a Moline farmer and almost 17 years old. Using a beautiful narrative voice I fell in love with, A Strong and Sudden Thaw is told from David Anderson's point of view. In some respects there's a regressive quality to life in Moline, as the people lead a life comparable to that lived in early 1800's America, with no electricity or running water, a one-room school house, a healer instead of a doctor, and the communing having adopted hardworking and god-fearing conservative values that at first glance seem quite familiar, but that later are revealed to be reactionary and extreme. The cold and snow still plague the north, but Virginia is a place where people can live, if not thrive. Day's beautiful prose, characterization, the post-apocalyptic fantasy world she created and the young adult, coming-of-age story in A Strong and Sudden Thaw caught both my attention and imagination from page one and I couldn't put the book down until it was done.Īpproximately one hundred years after the Ice nearly ended civilization, the people of Moline, Virginia are still recovering from the catastrophe.

A Strong and Sudden Thaw by R.W. Day