This is one mega-book! I don’t believe it is a compilation of an actual series, as I didn’t hear those divisions stated in the audiobook. This weighs in at over 27 hours! Because the author has so much word real estate, she’s really able to explore what happens between all the people in the book and how they deal with external circumstances. It can be broadly divided into three sections (called Parts in the book), with the last section seeming to take up more than its third. The premise is that scientists have accidentally and catastrophically sent us into a new ice age as they attempted to do something good by tinkering with the weather. So suddenly, in the middle of September, the world is plunged into what the title states, an endless (or nearly so) winter with snow continuing to fall day after day as it piles up all around and on top of things, killing crops that hadn’t yet been harvested and destroying buildings—wreaking havoc and portending a very bleak future, indeed.
The book’s first part takes place at the female protagonist’s homestead in rural Ohio. Let’s just say she’s not a people person; she lives on her own and is mostly self-sufficient. Once the storm hits, she gets some unexpected, and at least one unwelcome, visitors! There are many interpersonal goings-on in both this section in the book—at times, I wanted to throttle the male protagonist’s teenage daughter—and the other two. I could understand the female protagonist’s frustration with these people. She wanted a very different life, but she is a natural leader who actually helps those in her sphere adjust and change as they get accustomed to their new normal.
The second part of the book focuses on a journey when the ragtag group decides to move to a different location so they can be better protected from the never-ending snow. As always happens in these dystopian books, our group of people always seems to run into bad groups of people, including some low-life bandits masquerading as former police officers in this section and a very cultish, cruel group in the third part of the story.
The third part of the story is the longest, and certainly, my least favorite. The cultish group of people mentioned above is an extended family who have these bizarre beliefs that essentially allow them to be very cruel to people as they see things as the will of the gods. They are harsh and terrible to our little ragtag group. In this section, the female protagonist certainly has a crisis of faith in herself and her ability as a leader of their little band, and she is treated the most harshly by the evil cult members. What happens to her and the group in this sheltering cavern is pretty awful and exceedingly violent—especially the final stand-off. In fact, if you have a low threshold for bloody violence, skip this book altogether. I’m not particularly wild about excessive violence myself, but by that point in the book, I was already invested in the characters and wanted to see how they would get out of their circumstances.
It’s hard to say if I would actually recommend this book, even after all the time I spent listening to it. Perhaps if that extensive third section were different, I could more wholeheartedly suggest it to other listeners. But that last section just left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, despite a too short but well-earned victory lap at the end, and well, that’s where the book ended.