After a plague takes all adults, the child survivors rebuild a society adrift from the past, beholden to the fate of an unseen hand.
The Year of the Blue Snow follows a group of child survivors in the wake of a plague that takes all adults. Thrown together by fate’s whimsy, they endeavor to resurrect a new civilization at the edge of the wilderness. They must quickly learn to bring in the fall harvest to ensure their survival through winter by rediscovering the myriad skills lost to them through the neglect of modern society, while simultaneously defending the land on which they have come to live, support, and depend from a band of feral, violent nihilists. Through the course of four seasons, plotted and expected since antiquity, the children gain adulthood as they cope with the first death in the camp amidst the earth darkening into winter. Spring and the birth of their first new member follow, even as events seem to foretell an outside hand at work in their movements. Each event purposefully lays the ground for the next, charting a course foretelling the city’s soldiers’ arrival in summer and the climactic showdown for control of a fate seemingly held by a higher power, illustrating duality’s paradox: from all things flow both good and evil.