The first prose of any length I've read from Lemire, not that it's exactly long. Clearly it ties into his new comic of the same name, with Jock both illustrating that and supplying the cover here; equally clearly, its arrival on Netgalley was perfect timing for me, given this is the first time London has had multiple days of snow in, what, a decade? Beyond that, though, I'm not clear on how the two will fit together, having only read the comic's brief #0, which was more of a taster than anything else. Both follow Milliken, a girl who lives a hunter-gatherer life with her sister and father in the Trench, which is exactly what it sounds like – a slightly more hospitable refuge running through a wasteland of snow and ice. And you must never, ever leave the Trench. Even from that summary, anyone with the least experience of SF has probably worked out the reveal behind this primitive society, and lo and behold, the story delivers it. I can only presume this will turn out to be prequel, because the reveal was hardly a revelation first time out, so if the comic goes over the same territory again at any length, that's going to be a right old slog. And while these cross-platform experiences seem to be all the rage lately, The High Republic and Time Lord Victorious both have bigger IP at their back and vastly greater range within their settings, not to mention their creators. Speaking of which, based on this sample Lemire isn't exactly the most distinctive prose stylist ever. Still, the story's evocation of living a hugely restricted and repetitive life among the whiteness and cold was relatable enough to just about carry this through for now.

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.