Fifteen-year-old Willo was born after the onset of a new Ice Age that has left Europe in winter’s grip in S. D. Crockett’s atmospheric first novel, “After the Snow,” a thriller for the post-global-warming era.

    A strong survivor, Willo lives with his family in the hills outside the city. He wears a coat of hand-stitched skins and a dog skull as a fierce kind of hat, and when his family is taken away by the government, he goes out in search of them, following the voice of a dog inside his head.

    Traveling across a harsh, cold, snow-covered terrain filled with wild packs of dogs, Willo heads into the city, a hopeless realm of starvation and violence. Along the way, he falls for a girl and discovers his family secrets, as well as the deep truth of who he is and where he belongs.

    “After the Snow” does not seem to truly be set in either the future or in some alternate past, instead residing almost entirely outside time. But readers who get bogged down with questions about computers and McDonald’s are going to miss out on a wonderful story — one that wobbles* a little in the final third but comes to a beautiful ending.

    The story Crockett tells is a deeply human one of survival and self-discovery. “After the Snow” is a coming-of-age novel, a brutal, tough and sometimes truly transcendent* one.(SD-Agencies)