Review: The Children's Blizzard

The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin My rating: 2 of 5 stars 

I had never heard of the Children’s Blizzard of 1888 before picking up this book. In parts of Nebraska and the Dakota Territory, the storm arrived without notice at midday after a beautiful winter morning. It held some of the worst blizzard conditions and some of the lowest temperatures ever recorded in the Great Plains and it claimed the lives of many children struggling to find their way home from school.

I was disappointed in this book. There is a lot of background information (chapters of it), then the storm comes (in one chapter), then there is a somewhat quick wrap-up in the final chapters. The author follows several families impacted by the storm, but the stories are so chopped up, and interspersed with so much extraneous detail, that you begin to lose track of who is who. All together too much background, too many stories for this to really connect.