Review: One Not So Fine Day, then and now
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 18, 2014
“Snow and adolescence are the only problems that disappear if you ignore them long enough.”  Earl WilsonThe above quote appears just before the prologue of SNOW DAY: A NOVELLA, right after Billy Stone’s hand drawn map of his neighborhood in about 1975 when he was ten years old.  It’s not quite accurate.  The snow eventually disappeared but Billy wasn’t yet an adolescent nor did the problem disappear.  He moved on, but the day haunted him for years.  In the book, he tells the story of a particular day as he saw it then and as he looked back in retrospect.When he was 10 years old in 1976, Billy wanted to do what his older brother and his friends did.  They were a grown up 14 and had privileges, especially being able to cross the street to play on another block. They also fought against neighborhood bullies.  Tommy, a boy Billy’s age, was different and just wanted to have friends, especially Billy who seemed more accepting.SNOW DAY tells what happened on one momentous day when the desire to prove himself led Billy into several situations including finding the body of a young boy in a basement, hitching on to the back of a car in order to body ski, getting involved in an car/bus accident, hiding from the police,  meeting up with a strange man, and, most serious at that point, getting into trouble with his mother because he was late for dinner.Well-written and somewhat gripping, Dan Maurer puts us into Billy’s mind as he relates the experiences of the day.  He then reexamines it thirty seven years later after someone comments., “We had an idyllic childhood.”  As the grown up Billy says, “After all, we live in a different, more frightening world today; more care is required.  In short, it’s more dangerous than it was when we were kids...isn’t it?”  “I began to wonder, was it truly the way we remember it?  Or, to put it another way, is it the lens through which we view our past that makes it seem idyllic and not necessarily the times in which we actually lived.?”“But the other, darker truth is this: despite the warm memories we hold courtesy of the loving community that bore us, we were never far from danger while we played on or off the block, never far from being the boy in the cellar.  No one ever is; not then, not now.  In those days we just chose to close our eyes to it.  It was easier and more comforting that way.  The blindness set us free.”This book was a free Amazon download.