Sofa Spotlight - The Boy from the Snow, Maria Johnson

What better way to start the New Year than with the first post being about the first book of a brand new author. Well, she’s not quite brand new, her book has been around for about a year now, but I’ve only recently found it.

So what am I talking about? I’m talking about The Boy from the Snow by Maria Johnson. I first heard it described as a bit like A Game of Thrones but without all the violence and sex. Which appealed to me because A Game of Thrones was something I would have liked to have got into (I got as far as watching the first episode with my housemate. We watched the whole thing in silence, then switched it off and never spoke of it again.) Anyway it was enough for me to give it a try.

And I wasn’t disappointed.

I’m not going to tell you much about the storyline, because you need to go and read it for yourself. What do I want to tell you about is how Johnson handles certain aspects of the story, which I think is done very well and is important in our modern culture.

The story follows the fortunes of Daniel a soldier who lives and fights in the North West of Celtic England. Being a soldier naturally brings battles and it’s the description of these battles that really got me thinking. Quite often we watch or read stuff that contains a lot of killing, whether it’s Lord of the Rings, a war film, or a murder mystery, entertainment is full of it. What I thought made this book stand out is that, although Johnson does describe death, she also describes the cost of each lost life, both on the family of the dead and also on those who do the killing. It struck me as an interesting take when most of what I see or read leaves me desensitised to seeing death, this made me think about the human cost to those deaths.

Likewise there is no sex scene in this book. And there doesn’t need to be. The story wouldn’t have gained from having it in there and it was nice to read something that I didn’t want to put down because it contained scenes I didn’t want to read.

Needless to say, the storyline is good, I consumed it in less than a week and it possibly made me fall in love with reading again. My recommendation is that if, unlike me, you still have book vouchers left over from Christmas then use them to buy this. At the very least it should be on your reading list for 2019. It’s also fun to read if you know Cumbria and the Lakes at all.

It’s a good debut novel and I hope that there will be more from Johnson. I have coffee ready if there is a sequel.