*3.5 stars.

This is the debut work of Danya Kukafka and I hope we will see much more from this young author. While it is a murder mystery, the solving of the crime is almost secondary to the delving into the psyche of the three unique characters from whose point of view the story is told.

The murder victim is Lucinda Hayes, a popular middle school student, whose body is found on the carousal of the local park. One of the first people to be suspected is Cameron, her neighbor and fellow student, a misfit and loner. Some say he stalked Lucy...he was occasionally spotted staring into her bedroom window, standing still as a statue. And later in his own room, he would draw sketch after sketch of her. Was it love or obsession?

Then there is Russ, the police officer investigating the crime, who used to work with Cameron's father, who left town after being accused of beating a woman during a routine stop--the woman with whom he was having an affair. Russ is struggling with his own unresolved feelings.

And the final character is Jade, another creative misfit student who resented Lucy for her perfect life--for stealing her boyfriend and her babysitting job. Jade's story is told in the first person which contrasts her dysfunctional family life with Lucinda's. Jade often mentally rewrites her interactions with other people as a scene from a play in which things turn out as she wishes they would. Jade is my favorite character and is somewhat the hero of the story when the killer is finally revealed.

I found this story to be quite satisfying on many levels and wish to thank the publisher and author for the offer to read an arc of the book through NetGalley.

I'm not sure if I really liked this book or not. It starts out with a lot of promise and then just kind of fizzles out for me. The story is not much about the girl that is found dead in the snow as it is about the 3 people that were somehow tied to her. Different, very different and different can be good!

Kukafka's writing was beautiful, but the writing didn't grab me. A literary mystery that could have used more bite and character development. I would give her work a chance in the future because she definitely has promise.

The girl in the snow is named Lucinda. She lies on a schoolyard merry-go-round dead. Three people are connected to her story. Cameron a boy who feels strongly about Lucinda and for her but who seems to be autistic. Jade another outsider who is jealous of Lucinda and tries to befriend Cameron. And Russ a cop who was Cameron 's fathers partner on the police forever.
All suspicions seem to be on Cameron a boy who wanders the dark neighborhood streets in the dead of night spying on his neighbors. At various turns in the story each character plays out their part in Lucinda's life and her last night. Slowly the true becomes known until a shocking ending. The story is interesting because it is predominant told from the voice of children who see the world differently than adults. Cameron is an interesting character to explore since it is seldom autism is a major part of the mystery. Well written and a good read

I surprised myself by liking this book a lot more than I originally anticipated. This was my first time reading this author, and I will definitely be reading Kukafka again. Told from three perspectives over three days and a while after the murder of a school girl named Lucinda, the points of view are drastically different: the boy who loved her, the girl who hated her, and the detective desperate for an answer he can live with. There were times the author went off on a few tangents, or where one of the characters got bogged down in their own bad habits longer than I cared for. Regardless Kukafka wrote three very separate people and blended them beautifully into one story. I also loved how Kukafka describes emotions in this novel. Somehow they are described perfectly, even down to how they differ between teens and adults; Kukafka even goes into detail about the physicality of grief and guilt and anger, it is truly beautiful and all encompassing.

What an amazing writer! I've never read anything like this before. It was just so intriguing. The author was grossly eloquent when describing the characters unpleasant flaws and you can't look away. I guarantee that if you set this book down you won't be able to stop thinking about it until you pick it back up again.

GIRL IN SNOW: Danya Kukafka's first novel has a beautiful cover and an intriguing title but it is long. While it is only 350+ pages it felt like so much more to me. Much of it felt like padding. Why? I loved the way it was written. She wrote character chapters. Short chapters that focused on each character and furthered the story bit by bit. Or sometimes not at all. I liked a couple of the characters, the rest were largely forgettable.

Parts of GIRL were totally believable - the parts that related to how teenagers act. The rest of the book I found completely unbelievable - and I read mostly horror, which requires a suspension of belief.

I wanted to like GIRL IN SNOW a lot more than I did. It was a hard book for me to finish, but I really wanted to know whodunnit. In the end, I gave it three stars, which means I thought it was OK. Will you like it? Why not sample the writing and see?

Simon and Schuster gave me a digital to review.

Through the eyes of three narrators Girl In Snow tells the story of the days after a girl is found murdered. It’s a complex story with many characters and lots of little plot lines, also connected to past events. I enjoyed the book, but I thought the first half was a little slow. In the second half everything comes together and starts making a bit more sense.
Girl In Snow is not a traditional whodunit, and though one of the narrators is a police officer, there isn’t any focus on the police side of things. The book is much more about personal relationships, deceit, love, connections.
I really like Kukafka’s writing; it’s intimate and engaging. It was easy to relate to the narrators, and other characters, flawed (and in some cases unlikeable) as they may be.

More positives than negatives. See full review on goodreads.

I'm not sure where to start with this one, so I'll go with this: Girl in Snow is a weird book. Was it good? Was it bad? I'm not sure. It kept my attention and I wanted to know what happened to Lucinda, so I kept reading...I guess that accounts for something.

I'd put this book somewhere in the vein of Gillian Flynn, to be honest. There is a lot of raw emotion and anger hidden within the three characters telling the story and I think that's what hooked me.

So, a young girl has died and the whole town is in an uproar. Adults and children are pointing fingers and the whole town is talking about it.

We hear the story from Cameron, Jade, and Russ. Each of them had their own relationship to Lucinda or the case and each of them have a very distinctive voice.

Cameron, the shy boy who draws (and stalks) Lucinda. Jade, the emo girl who hates Lucinda. Russ, an officer working Lucinda's case and Cameron's father's former best friend.

Each of these characters weave a story in their own way. Each of them is brutally honest, almost to where it's uncomfortable to read, but it works. This is definitely a great mystery that will keep you guessing until you get to the big reveal.

So, yes. This is a good book. Weird. Still good.

I want to thank NetGalley for letting me read this book. It did keep my interest.

That said, when you read like I do, using text-to-speech almost exclusively, books like this leave me feeling lost. I feel I may have missed the important sentences as to who-done-it and why. There were a lot of characters and they all sound the same, the writing style of the narrative is the same in the dialogue. That may not mean too much when visually engaged with the story, but I often didn't know which characters thoughts/memories I was in.

This was an ARC or early read copy so by the time others will read it these other problems may be fixed: Between sections, there is a line ___. Often that stops the TTS. And often the name of the person who is starring in the next section is totally left out with TTS. I assume these are formatting issues that will be solved and others who get to read this with their eyes will be able to stay with the story and find it all pulls together.

Using the thoughts of one who seems autistic or in other ways a little different than the norm, was a nice tool. I found the character Cameron to be very interesting. Others I found harder to understand. Maybe that says more about me than the characters being portrayed?

At any rate, I think others may find this book to be very good. I loved to see your comments. I may have to come back to this book and read again to see if I can find where I turned left when the writer turned right. ???

Wow! Wow! I could not believe the author was so young. This is an amazing novel that keeps you hooked. A page turner, I highly recommend this book to all. I could not stop reading this book to find out what happened next and who did what!

I want to thank NetGalley, the publisher and the author for my ARC copy for a fair and honest review.

I admit I quite liked this book. It takes place in a small Colorado town and revolves around the murder of a teenage girl. The story follows the lives of Cameron, Jade and Russ, all misfits in their own rights and in how the death of this girl has effected each of them.

You wonder as you read, whether or not Cameron could of killed Lucinda Hayes, after all he had been watching her for years from afar, I would say stalking is the more appropriate word, but could the gawky 9th grader really have killed her? Could it have been Jade and her spell that she cast out of jealousy? Or could it be someone else entirely? I'm not about to give you the answer but I will say that it does get solved in the end.

It's not a page turner by any sense of the word, but I became invested in the characters in the story and found that I was thinking about them even when I wasn't reading. The characters were well developed but I did find that a few things left me wanting more, hence the 3 star rating.

That being said this was a good debut novel and I look forward to reading more from the author again.

The creaking of a playground carousel in the night wind is the only sound that settles in the darkness. It cradles the lifeless body of fifteen year old Lucinda Hayes. Tiny snowflakes drift and cling to the strands of her long blonde hair. Making no sounds.........much like Lucinda herself.

Murder never sits well. Especially in small towns. Small towns like Broomsville in northern Colorado. The shock has less space to travel in.

Danya Kukafka propels Girl in Snow forward with characters beset with deep, dark, raging turmoil. Young Cameron Whitley, strange and elusive, is so taken with Lucinda that he sneaks out at night just to watch her every move through her bedroom window. His reputation at school is the class freak who will never fit in. Jade has always held such animosity for the popular Lucinda since they were children. Jade barely exists in the abusive home of her alcoholic mother and her sister. Russ, a police officer, goes through the motions of his deadend job. His marriage to Ines suffers from anger issues never fully dealt with on both sides of this equation.

Girl in Snow is lined with more of a YA flavor. Kukafka reveals the heavy angst and disappointments that seem to swallow up the younger characters in this storyline. There is the far too noticeable depiction of the weight of daily teen life in a one-horse town. We hear over and over again that life totally sucks. Each character seems to suffer from over-exposure due to the sunami of bruised and raw emotions that follow from page to page. These added elements to the storyline seem to overshadow the essential thread of the murder itself. "Because you're a freak, too."

Perhaps this was Kukafka's intention all along........to present a multi-pronged storyline dealing with weakened friendships, questionable relationships, and unrequieted love. The murder itself serves as a backdrop for these broken characters who use it as a springboard to express their heavy-ladened backstories. Although a good read, it was just too many spins across the dance floor for me.

I received a copy of Girl in Snow through NetGalley for an honest review. My thanks to Simon & Schuster and to Danya Kukafka for the opportunity.

I thought Girl in Snow was going to be an adult thriller but it was pretty much a young adult book. The story is about a fifteen year old girl named Lucinda who is found dead on a playground. There are three narrators: Cameron, Jade and Russ. Cameron and Jade are children who went to school with Lucinda, and Russ was the cop assigned to her case. Even though one of the narrators was a cop, I didn’t really feel like the story focused enough on Lucinda or her murder. It mostly focused on the lives of Russ, Cameron and Jade. I was hoping for more information on who the killer was and why they did it, but that was barely covered in the book. I thought there was too much sex in this story especially considering the ages of the characters. One of the characters was thirteen during a flashback sex scene and I think that is very inappropriate and it’s definitely not what I want to be reading. I had really high hopes for this book and I went into it thinking I’d love it, but it wasn’t what I was expecting.

A teen girl's body is discovered in snow on a playground. There are a few of the usual suspects: the stalker boy, the ex-con night janitor, the jealous ex-friend, the popular ex-boyfriend. I really enjoyed the book for the most part, until it began to reveal itself to be fairly ordinary (an almost romance between two men, an illicit affair between married man and teen girl, an abusive mother). When the killer was unmasked, it was unfortunately not a surprise.

Still it was fast-paced and the characters were interesting. I appreciated that no one was perfect.

Thanks to Netgalley for the arc to review.

Girl in Snow is a semi mystery story by Danya Kukafka. I say semi mystery because it seemed more of a coming of age for two of the three main characters with the mystery thrown in. I was given a copy to review.

Hi, I was sent a widget for this book and before I did anything it appeared on my shelf, if I clicked it, it was in error. Thanks for the opportunity but I don't think I'm the correct audience for this book and wouldn't do it justice. thanks again