Light causes snow to melt or evaporate, eventually.
The title of the book is an apt symbol of the main characters' situations. Finding the baby awakens a fire within both of them because they have control over making something right, after having experienced the total chaos of unexpectedly losing half their family and being hurled into the unknown. She and her father are coexisting in an emotionally frozen state, but she is just beginning her life and cannot stay frozen. They had lost half their family-Nicky's mother and her baby sister-two years prior to finding the abandoned baby. What the cover copy doesn't go into is that the Nicky and her father are walking wounded, like the mother of the abandoned baby. We read that Nicky wonders what makes a family. They rescue her and a couple of weeks later the mother shows up at their house to deal with what happened. The cover copy tells us the main kernel of the story-Nicky and her dad, who live on the outskirts of a small New Hampshire town, find an abandoned baby in the woods. Telling the story in the present tense rather than the past affirms that the Nicky is, at core, the same person she was back when, and yet the events brought on momentous change in her life. On the second page of the story, the narrator, Nicky, tells us she's 30 but the events she's relating occur when she is 12. So I think that people who have experienced the kind of grief that keeps you from getting out of bed will really appreciate this book, and those who have had blissfully uneventful lives will miss a lot of the subtlety in it.
I am glad I didn't base whether to read this book on the reviews here because I think a lot of people didn't "get it," and maybe that's Shreve's failing, but I've observed that, by and large, people don't really understand grief until they experience it first hand, unfortunately.
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