Review--SNOW ANGEL

Review For:
Snow Angel, by Jamie Carie
ISBN: 9780805445336, Publisher: B&H Publishing Group

To summarize Snow Angel, by Jamie Carie in one word- intense. This book is Jamie Carie’s debut novel and she has another to be released this April. She resides with her husband and three children in Indianapolis, Indiana.
In an Alaskan cabin, during a brutal blizzard, Noah Wesley, believes he hears God Himself urging him to open the door. There he finds Elizabeth, barely clinging to life and half frozen, unconscious on his very doorstep. She keeps her horrid past of her adoptive parents, a rape, and the man who has been chasing her clear across the country hidden from everyone, claiming she was only after one thing- gold. But Elizabeth was swiftly becoming much more than a damsel in distress to Noah. He was learning, the hard way, that she was far from it, she was the woman he dared to love. If only she’d stay still long enough.
Taking place mostly in 1897, during the famous gold rush, this historical romance charges you on a never-ending roller coaster of emotions. Opening with a prologue of Elizabeth’s birth mother, Jane, you are forced to swipe away tears at the torrent of pain and sadness. Dropped immediately into the storm where Noah found Elizabeth, and on to the adventure later in the book, you find yourself at the edge of your seat, overcome with heart pounding tension. The snippets of her past are carefully dropped, along with letters to her birth mother from the private investigator she hired, adding fuel to the fire. And then, of course, there’s the love between them… never quite relaying what they covet, what they really feel. It breaks your heart over and over again.
The only real criticism I have for this book is that the author, for future books, should be a bit more careful in phrasing and word choices. In historical fiction, it is always best to try, whenever possible, to incorporate dialog and phrasing to days of yore- as they would have then. There really wasn’t much to draw me to the present, but I feel it would only aid in a more engaging view of the times and people to have more of it there.
I’m not entirely sure what Jamie Carie did before she began writing novels, but I think it’s safe to say she can quit her day job. She masterfully portrayed these characters in a light, to which, make them very believable in the reader’s eyes. The plot flowed well, and this was immensely difficult to put down. It was a pleasure to learn a bit of history about the gold rush, as seen through the characters, and about the Alaskan terrain. This was an evocative and poignant tale, one I won’t soon forget.

Kelly Moran,
Author and Reviewer