Jeff Lemire's short story is set on a small ice planet, a coming of age story, in which young almost 13 year old girl, Milliken, lives with her younger sister, Mae, and father live in a small village, her mother is dead. It is the morning after the Winter Feast when Milliken wakes up early in their ice cave in the side of the Trench to hunt for a trenchdog. She is breaking the rules, but feels the desperate need to prove herself. There are 3 Trench rules that the community must follow, never leave the trench, the trench provides and the trench is endless, trying to find the end will bring only madness. Milliken's journey bring fear and unexpected discoveries that are to challenge all that she has been brought up to believes. Many thanks to Amazon Original Stories for an ARC.

Dismal sci-fi. Plodding nothing story about a character with a stupid name in a generic dystopian world unimaginatively rendered. Zero interesting things happen, lots of dull description, and all likely pointless to the comic, which will probably explain all of this crapola in it anyway. Lemire's prose is capable but unexciting and sleep-inducing, much like most of his recent storytelling. Whenever it comes to sci-fi, Lemire is always terrible - Snow Angels is snow different.

Jeff Lemire writes prose here for the first time that I'm aware of. What made more sense was to find that there is a comic version of this story, and it is an Issue Zero of what I guess is hoped to be a full title to come. Our teenaged heroine leaves her home early one morning, and dares skate much further along the bottom of the crevasse in the ice the community lives within – and finds, well, that would be telling. The whole comic – not just this one-shot prose extract – is clearly intended to be about the mysterious world in the Trench, and how the people like our gal got to be there. As it is, then, this is a decent 'origin story' for her inquisitiveness, but as a stand-alone it's not much cop. It has a good scene-setting, inasmuch as you can picture the peculiar location, it has some mystery, but it also has that old-hat obfuscation, or whatever you want to call it, where the blind man meets the elephant. You know the kind of thing, where (par example) the monkey rides a horse past a buried lump of metal and only later do we get to see what the lump once looked like when standing in New York harbour. How he managed that in the comic book version I'm yet to discover. But I don't think this short piece is going to inspire people to rush to find out, unfortunately.

Wow this was extremely boring. I kept hoping it would get better but it just turned from a snowy dystopian story about a girl named Milliken into a weird scifi thing that went nowhere.

I see it was a short comic first. Maybe the story just didn’t translate. Not recommended.

I was given this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Jeff Lemire writes a short sci-fi story, that isn't much of anything. I'm a bit surprised to see this show up in the adult fiction section, as it reads as run of the mill children's literature - in this case that means short sentences, writing focused on action, low on description, low on liveliness. The prose is kind of dull.

The sci-fi story itself is something you'll have read countless times before. Nothing surprising happens, in fact the story ends at the point where it could've actually become interesting (perhaps this is a lead up to a novel?). (I'm also not sure whether the story actually makes sense, but I can't go into that without spoilers.)

It's all a bit disappointing.