From what I did read, the book was interesting. but it was taking me entirely too long to get through the book so I sadly had to DNF it at page 78.

This book is filled with interesting and complex characters whose lives intersect in various (and sometimes unexpected) ways. The mystery of who killed the girl in snow is one that’s hard to figure out making it a worthwhile mystery.

I found this a slow and somewhat heartbreaking read. It rotates between the contrasting stories of three inhabitants of a small and dreary town in Colorado where a murder has just occurred. Given the context, I was expecting more of a pyschological thriller, but there is very little narrative tension and the death of Lucinda seems almost a sideshow.

Instead, Kukafka gives us more of a character study, going deep into the pain and suffering of these three damaged individuals. I liked the fact that this made them feel much more raw and human than characters in the average crime story. On the other hand, I didn't feel especially involved in what I was reading - the story never seemed to gain momentum and the absence of likeable characters made it hard to care what happened to them. I'm not sure this one lived up to its initial promise.

I am grateful to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the chance to read an advance copy of this work.

Lucinda Hayes is well-liked by most everyone who knows her in the small suburb where she goes to school. She has a secret admirer in an odd boy named Cameron Whitley, who lives nearby. Her rival for babysitting jobs, Jade Dixon-Burns, doesn’t like her much because they are opposites in many ways. She is popular at Jefferson High School. So, when Lucinda is found murdered on a playground carousel, there are plenty of secrets that will be revealed as police investigate her death.

One man on the investigation team is Officer Russ Fletcher, who was once partners with Cameron’s father. Cameron is a very talented artist, and also prone to wandering the neighborhood at night, watching people through their windows, including Lucinda. He calls these his Statue Nights since he stands as still as a statue while he watches. Due to his odd behavior, he gets harassed at school, especially when a popular girl tells a teacher that she thinks Cameron is the type of kid who would bring a gun to school and shoot people. As a reader, you feel bad for the kid because he seems to have such a hard time. But, you also think, could he be a suspect?

Jade is an intelligent girl who has a bad relationship with her abusive mother. She’s also a talented writer who dreams up imaginary screenplays in her head. Her best friend, known as Zap, was dating the murdered girl, giving Jade a reason and motive to hate Lucinda. Could Jade be a suspect too?

As the investigation gets under way, more and more details come out. The suspicion falls on various people at different times, including Cameron, and the art teacher. Officer Fletcher recalls more details about Cameron’s father, who left town for some reason. We gradually learn the backstory on this too.

The book is told from the perspective of these three people, Cameron, Jade, and Officer Fletcher. Through their eyes, the reader learns about the secrets held by various characters who make up the town. The story moves along at a good pace, but not so fast that you feel like the author is just throwing facts at you. She takes time to develop the characters fully and give them well-rounded backgrounds and histories. The ending is a surprise and I didn’t see it coming at all.

I liked the fact that the characters had depth and were not just cookie-cutter characters populating the pages. They are real people to the reader, with real lives and real quirks. Flawed, just like we all are. The story is complex, but not so much that you can’t follow along. The new clues that are introduced as you read further help keep the story exciting throughout the whole book. Overall, I thought it was well done and polished. There is a moodiness to the story and the setting that the reader picks up on too. Things are not perfect in this town and the people that live there are not either. It’s quite a good book and a good solid read.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance reader copy I received in exchange for my honest review.

This book kept me guessing until the end. Three different people telling their story about their lives and connection to a girl who has been murdered. I thought the author did a great job telling the story.

This book had a lot of promise and I've seen it all over social media. Unfortunately it just didn't quite work for me. The uniqueness in the writing style just didn't really fit into what I usually prefer and drew me away from the story itself.

Who are you when no one is watching?

Cameron Whitley knows. At least he knew Lucinda, his 15-year-old classmate who’s been recently murdered. Love and obsession are one in the same for Cameron. His obsession grows through his nightly vigils, standing outside of Lucinda’s house, watching her through her bedroom window.

Jade, Cameron’s too smart and too self-aware classmate and neighbor, knows what Cameron’s been up to. She sees him outside every night and watches him watching Lucinda. But she’s not about to say anything, even after Lucinda’s murder. Coming from the perfect picture of a broken family, Jade hates everything Lucinda is and everything she has: the perfect body, perfect family, and popularity in school. Even the boy Jade loves is in love with Lucinda. When her former friend turns up dead, Jade wonders if her voodoo ritual to get Lucinda to disappear worked after all.

Russ is a cop who is working the murder and brings the ultimate small town feeling to the story. While managing marital problems and his own suspicions about who Lucinda’s killer is, Russ is also haunted by the ghost of his former partner: Cameron’s father. It begs the question of whether Cameron’s followed in his father’s violent footsteps.

As the three narrators circle around each other, getting closer to each other, the mystery of Lucinda’s murder burns slowly in the background. Built up with poetic prose, Kukafka examines the lives of Cameron, Jade, and Russ, showing the reader not their differences, but their similarities. Though their situations differ, Cameron, Jade, and Russ are connected through their broken hearts and their inability to understand their place in this new, Lucinda-less world.

Less thriller than literary fiction, Girl in Snow is a winter afternoon snowstorm: quiet, slow-moving, and beautiful.

A 15 year old girl is found dead on a snowy morning. She is beautiful, and loved by most. The story is told from the perspective of Cameron, a lanky guy who is not so secretly obsessed with Lucinda. Jade, a girl who everyone ignores, who hates Lucinda and Russ, a cop- a friend of Cameron's missing father.
The story is a web of interconnected events, a web of interconnected stories. I had to go back and read the blurb once again, wasn't this book about the mysterious death of Lucinda? Because the book is barely about the death itself.
It dwells into the life of Cameron , who's dad goes away after being a cop and a suspect. He is odd to say it simply. He doesn't have many friends, but art is his best companion. His description of the simplest things are complex- that's how he is.
Jade is a typical teenager who hates her body, who hates everyone who is pretty. She is in love with Lucinda's boyfriend, she has all reasons to hate her.
Russ is yet another twisted character. His best friend and companion Lee abandons everyone-how does this impact him? His marriage seems to be an arrangement of convenience, is there love ?
The book was a very long read. I enjoy details, but the details in this book are far too many. Sometimes these details stand out, sometimes I just skipped through them because they just dragged the book on for no apparent reason.
There were parts that give you a peek at a person's life who is mentally stressed. It gives glimpses of people's lives who are struggling with their identiies. There is barely anything about the death, the murder. Lucinda is a barely threaded into the story- just cause.
At the end, I couldn't be bothered about who killed her, or why. The other characters overpowered the plot so much that the thriller bit is completely lost.
Overall, a book that I partly enjoyed. But am still looking for the thriller element.

Thank you Netgalley for the opportunity to review this ARC of Girl in Snow.

Lucinda Hayes, beloved HS student is found murdered in a sleepy town where crime rarely happens. Through a mixed matched quilt of characters, especially three in particular, we are able to find how it happened through the events leading up to the murder. Jade, a rebel without a cause who has a bark worse than her bite. Cameron, a neighbor who took way too much advantage of his view to her home, And Russ, an officer who, while not assigned to the murder, is definitely linked. Who is responsible for Lucinda's murder, and why?

Hmm, I've read a lot of books like this, and on paper, this seems like the kind of thing that I would just gobble up. It's hard to put my finger on exactly why this book left a sour taste in my mouth, it just did. Perhaps the ending was a bit too weaksauce. The story a bit too disjointed, and (Roxane Gay would smack me for saying this) the characters were just not likable enough for me. When you read a story and most of the characters tick you off, it's that much harder to get into the story. I'm sorry to say that this was a miss for me.

I was pulled in right away by the cover and the synopsis. It turns out that this murder mystery is more of a character study of three alternating characters where WHO did is almost secondary to the three main characters and the delving into their lives and stories. They each have such an intense inner struggle that is very interesting. In the end I found myself having read the last half of the book nearly in one sitting. Highly recommended!

Thanks, NetGalley for the ARC - unfortunately i wasn’t able to read this one.

Rating: 1.5/5

Genre: Thriller (more about this in the review)

Recommended Age: 16+ (violence, witchcraft, stalking, murder)

I received a free copy of this book through NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

When a beloved high schooler named Lucinda Hayes is found murdered, no one in her sleepy Colorado suburb is untouched—not the boy who loved her too much; not the girl who wanted her perfect life; not the officer assigned to investigate her murder. In the aftermath of the tragedy, these three indelible characters—Cameron, Jade, and Russ—must each confront their darkest secrets in an effort to find solace, the truth, or both. In crystalline prose, Danya Kukafka offers a brilliant exploration of identity and of the razor-sharp line between love and obsession, between watching and seeing, between truth and memory.

Compulsively readable and powerfully moving, Girl in Snow offers an unforgettable reading experience and introduces a singular new talent in Danya Kukafka.

In the wake of Murder on the Orient Express becoming a movie, I had an itching for some thrillers. One I’ve had on my to-read list was this book. The synopsis sounded good and so I decided to give it a try. In the end I had to DNF this book. The good points about this book is that it’s not a typical thriller and it has more of a YA feel to it. The book focuses on the suspects rather than the crime. The book was interesting in that it left the reader in suspense on who the actual perpetrator was. However, those were the only things I thought were good about the book.

I had a hard time reading this book because of how drawn-out the writing was. The author constantly went off on tangents and the author seems to have the Stephen King syndrome of writing in which an author will write for awhile on a topic in the book that has no point to the plot whatsoever. It became very hard to wade through all of the detail to get to the meat of the story and it was the main reason I DNF’d the book. Because of how the book was written, the plot and pacing heavily suffered from the writing. The plot was lost in the words and the pacing drew to a standstill at several times in the book. The characters in the book were also not very well developed at the point I stopped reading and they were very weird choices for main characters (2 of them being high schoolers) considering that this book was supposed to be an adult thriller. The victim is not a character I found myself to care about and the professionals in this book seemed to be way too dumb to be realistic. The book really shouldn’t have been marketed as a thriller because you spend more time on the suspects and not on the crime. This book also switches between multiple POVs.

Verdict: Overall, I found this book to not be my cup of tea. It was the opposite of everything I hoped for and skimming the back it seems like the ending and the killer is a cliché type character. I think this book could have been rewrote in so many different ways and it really could have been better if it focused on the crime rather than the daily lives of the suspects. Give this book a try if you want to read something different than your usual thriller.

I am unable to provide a review of this title because it was lost upon the updating of my kindle.

I tried. Really, I did. I love murder mysteries. I typically finish them in one night because I want to see who did it. This book could not keep me reading. The writing is too disorganized and the story does not get me attached to the victim. I almost never fail to complete a book, but this is one I had to stop reading about 3/4 way through.

If I had not received this book free via NetGalley, I would not have finished it.

"Girl in Snow" by Danya Kukafka sounds promising, but the reveal is badly paced with obvious red herrings. Even though the mystery lost my attention, there's potential in Kukafka's prose—it's occasionally lyrical with unique imagery.

My biggest gripe is that too much time is spent on descriptions and redundant flashbacks. Because the book starts after Lucinda's death and the sections are titled "Day One," "Day Two," and "Day Three," most of the character-building moments happened before page one. Kukafka flashes back to the core moments of each relationship instead of relying on the strength of her present-day scenes. It's not satisfying to be hit over the head with expository matter after carefully picking out the same information from well-crafted clues in an earlier scene.

The flashbacks aren't the only distraction. There's a curious fixation on gross/unsightly things. As an example, a description of Lee as "clean-shaven" is chased by a paragraph that describes the nicks around his mouth and how he must have looked with toilet-paper squares stuck to all his bloody cuts. There's nothing wrong with describing a clean-shaven face this way—it's certainly vivid—but no one is ever described without taking them down a few notches. The vast majority of characters have bad skin, smeary make-up, dripping sweat, pimples around their mouths and sprinkled across their sagging cleavage... Not even inanimate objects are safe! Misshapen beads are described as "tumorous." I think this is all to contrast with Lucinda Hayes's beauty, but it's emphasized to the point of silliness. The more over-the-top descriptions are funny when I don't think they're meant to be.

This grossness reminded me of Gillian Flynn's "Dark Places." I stopped reading Flynn's book after a background character was described as having dried scrambled eggs in her hair. (I admit this is a weird place to draw the line.) In college, I ran across an article that suggested every character should have something ugly about them. This was to warn writers against creating physically ideal characters that are hard to relate to and hard to imagine. It's easier to picture a crooked nose than a "perfect" nose—what does a perfect nose look like anyway? It's a good piece of advice, but Kukafka takes it too far.

These two points are the kind of complaints that would have been less noticeable if the overall story had been more compelling. A taut mystery provides a lot of cover for errors in craftsmanship. Since I wasn't particularly concerned about who killed Lucinda Hayes, the energy that should have gone into asking 'whodunnit' all went to nitpicking.

Overall: 2.4 (out of 5)

NB: This book was provided for review by the publisher, Simon & Schuster (via NetGalley).

I really wanted to like this one, but I just couldn't get into it. I've tried to go back to it several times and each time I lose interest really quickly. Unfortunately, it is going to have to go in my DNF pile.

I didn’t love this one. I thought the writing was off somehow. It felt disjointed. The flow got better towards the end, but never reached a point were I was just really enjoying it.

I thought this was going to be a little more of a mystery or thriller and it was really a character study with a cast of odd characters. Unfortunately, I didn’t love any of those characters. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even love the girl that got killed, so I didn’t really care who killed her. I never got to know her and the parts that told her part of the story didn’t make me care about her.

It was a decent storyline, but the focus didn’t stay on the murder enough and I didn’t enjoy the telling. I was expecting a story that led up to the murder and gave us clues as to how we got there, but mostly it was a character response with some flashback stories told through the character’s perspectives.

The ending occurred quickly and felt like a bit of a cop out. I won’t go into detail for obvious reasons, but I felt let down by the end. I expected a lot more.

Overall, I'm sorry to say, I thought it was just a meh story and a bit disappointing.

This book took me a long time to get into. It just seemed to go at a very slow pace for me and there was really no action until towards the end, and even that wasn't a lot of action, when we actually get to find out what truly what happened to Lucinda.
We are told the story through three different pair of eyes. Which the author did a good job with switching characters. I was not lost on that at all.

Cameron who likes to watch people late at night sounds really creepy. He is also dealing with the fact his dad is not there anymore because of what he did. We see how Cameron believes he might have "untangled" which is a term that he has give himself when he doesn't remember things.

Jade who never liked Lucinda comes very an unhappy home, and knows about Cameron and what he does. She also does a screen play of what she wishes she had said when she is speaking to someone. At first I was kind of like why is this in here? Yet I understood where Jade was coming from. We also have things in our head we really want to say, yet we never do.

Then we have Russ who you can tell has always been in love with Cameron's mom but yet was best friends with his dad. Russ has held secrets about Cameron's dad that he wished he never had. He got the call, "we've got a body" which he hasn't heard while being a cop. Small town doesn't seem to have much crime. As everything starts unraveling it brings back memories of Cameron's dad among other things.

It seems that there might have been a lot of people who wanted Lucinda dead yet when we find out who was behind it you never think about that person.
I will say I was disappointed that we didn't get to really get into Lucinda's life when we find out who the killer was why, did we never get like a clue? Why didn't we get to really know what was inside her journal? It was small things like that, that kind of made it not exciting. You know if a teenage girl is murdered in anyway her life is an opened book yet we never get told much except by Jade and Cameron.
I couldn't really connect with the characters at all. I found myself wondering if the pace of the book was going to pick up.
It was an okay book for me, three stars.

Wow this book took my breath away! So beautifully written.

This book...read more like a character study. Lucinda is found dead on the playground, lightly covered in snow. We then meet Jade, Cameron and Russ - everyone with a little something to hide.

To be honest, even when I read the description I thought "Oh, so...'Everything I Never Told you" again?" and...that's kind of where it sat. Characters fell flat and I didn't really care in the end who killed Lucinda.

Thank to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.