A Christmas Blizzard | 
| Author: Garrison Keillor
Publisher: Viking Adult
List Price: $21.95
Buy New: $11.90
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Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 1566
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 192
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.2 x 0.7
ISBN: 0670021369
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780670021369
ASIN: 0670021369
Publication Date: November 3, 2009 (New: Last 30 Days)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
A short comic novel about a Hawaii-bound holiday traveler who ends up stranded in his North Dakota hometown during a blizzard.
A wealthy and depressed man (thanks to the economy he’s not quite rich enough to expand his cache of paintings by Vincent Van Guy, the famed Dutch realist) bound for Christmas in the tropics is abruptly summoned home to North Dakota to visit an ailing aunt. He arrives just in time to be trapped there by a blizzard. The electricity goes out, and when it does, figures from his childhood appear, and historical figures too, for a festive candlelit holiday. In his reverie, our man reaches an epiphany worthy of the season—he hears the harkening angels sing, he is awed by the silence of the night (dead quiet: not even TV) and when he is finally rescued, leaves North Dakota resolved to simplify his life.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Enchanting, demanding, marvelous holiday reading November 22, 2009
Stephen V. Masse (Boston, MA)
Garrison Keillor has created an enchanting, if demanding, book that is mostly a love story but also combines totem/dream sequences, wacky pun-type inventions such as the fictional Hawaiian town of Kuhikuhikapapa'u'maumau (think Papa-u-mau-mau in the old song!), and those unique backhanded tickles to the funny bone that Keillor has turned into an art form in his Prairie Home Companion shows (an FBI character under cover as a husband, to keep watch over his wife's hyper patriotic activities, etc, etc).
The story demands a bit of background from the reader, in the sense that one who has read Tom Robbins, John Nichols, Mark Twain, or listened to A Prairie Home Companion, would more easily ken the sense of James Sparrow's inner experiences in this book. Keillor's drawing of Joyce Sparrow is right on the mark, and we amusedly tolerate her Christmas excess (she attends two Nutcrackers every year, two Messiahs, and three A Christmas Carols), while at the same time we fully understand James's "dark fog of nostalgia and disappointment."
James has done well in life, and wishes to retreat to Kuhikuhikapapa'u'maumau, Hawaii for Christmas, especially since there he can get relief from his obsessive worry about getting his tongue frozen to a pump handle. His wife is sick with a stomach virus, and his cousin Liz calls from Looseleaf, North Dakota to inform him that his uncle is about to die. So off he flies in the hopes of a quick drop-in on his way to Hawaii.
The rest is well worth a few hours of welcome holiday reading. Highly recommended.
 Harder to follow than Kerouac November 15, 2009
Christine Kahler
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is one of those stories that should end...and then he woke up and realized it was all a dream. The book is crazy, funny, hypnotic, fragmented, and sometimes hard to follow so be prepared! Mr. Keillor has one wacky imagination.
The mystery of life in a blizzard- a joyful Christmas absurdity November 6, 2009
wogan (Severna Park, MD United States)
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
Christmas novels are always nice to read, however this one of Garrison Keillor's is a bit different from what you might expect. It is not the sweet stories of the PBS show Prairie Home Companion, especially when you read in the first 2 pages that Mr. Sparrow, the main character, hates Christmas - the red-green monster - the world's longest and unhappiest holiday with the sheer horror of `The Little Drummer Boy'.
This story contains a lot of Midwestern guilt and woe, but yet its' little continual gems of exaggeration keep the humor alive: " it wasn't like her to fall apart like that, she being a member of the National rifle Association".
James Sparrow needs to learn to love Christmas, as his wife Joyce does and also get over his fear of freezing his tongue to pump handles- their siren call where he has to force himself to keep his tongue in his mouth and not on car door handles or bronze busts of Studs Terkel. His past contains among other problems; a mother who was obsessed by worries of the Christmas tree catching fire. James flies home to Looseleaf, North Dakota where he encounters his past in the form of a dead friend who is now a wolf. A big haired airline ticket lady, a cousin who is plotting to overthrow the US government and is married to an undercover FBI agent who has married her to keep an eye on her.
Through all the humorous absurdities James is rescued from his fears, the blizzard, potential arrest, learns to love Christmas, but most of all discovers the moral of the story: that small kindnesses can create great good...as good a moral as any for a Christmas book
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