New York Times Bestselling Author

Whiter Than Snow

"Dallas’ sense of time and place is pitch perfect and her affection for her characters infectious."
—Kirkus

Whiter Than Snow, Sandra’s ninth novel,opens in 1920 on a spring afternoon in Swandyke,a small town near Colorado’s Tenmile Range. Just moments after four o’clock, a large split of snow separates from Jubilee Mountain high above the tiny hamlet and hurtles down the rocky slope, sweeping up everything in its path including nine young children who are walking home from school. But only four children survive. Whiter Than Snow takes you into the lives of each of these families. Ultimately, each story serves as an allegory to the greater theme of the novel by echoing that fate, chance, and perhaps even divine providence, are all woven into the fabric of everyday life. And it’s through each character’s defining moment in his or her past that the reader understands how each child has become its parent’s purpose for living. In the end, it’s a novel of forgiveness, redemption, survival, faith, and family.

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Author’s Note

Most of my ideas for novels come like a flash of lightning, what James Michener called “the magic moment.”  I honestly don’t know where I got the idea for Whiter Than Snow, my upcoming novel. I remember only that I had attended a Western Writers of America convention in Scottsdale, Ariz., in June, 2008, and heard someone mention that a plot was a group of people thrown together to face a common danger.  Why the memory of a comment made on a day when it was over 100 degrees in the shade led to a book about an avalanche, I don’t know.  But the idea clicked, and Whiter Than Snow is one of my favorites of my books.  Perhaps that’s because it incorporates subjects that intrigue me—family relationships, gold mining, the Civil War, the black experience following that war, even the sinking of the Mississippi River steamboat Sultana, in which more people drowned than in the Titanic tragedy. My daughter Dana and I had visited the Tenement Museum in New York City just before I started the book, so one of my characters involves a Jewish girl who lives in that area.
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