September 3, 2025
Snap, by Susin Nielsen
A picture book I really love is AUTHOR’S DAY, by Daniel Pinkwater, which is perhaps truest to the experience of being a writer in public as anything I’ve ever read, the story of a children’s book writer who shows up to a school visit and is met with one abject humiliation after another, to the obliviousness of school staff, and it’s an experience like that—no doubt somewhat universal—is the catalyst for SNAP, the first novel for adults from celebrated and award-winning author Susin Nielsen.
Frances Partridge is smack-dab in the worst year of her life: her children are grown, prickly and difficult; she feels like she’s losing her mother to dementia; and her husband has left her, out of the blue, after 25 years of what she’d always believed as a happy marriage. And so when an adolescent boy starts harassing her during a school visit where she’s reading from her beloved middle grade series, Phoebe Unknown, Frances—on her last nerve—is not having any of it, and tells him what she really thinks…while his classmate is filming the whole episode, the video going viral within hours, and soon Frances has being dumped by her publisher and charged with assault on a minor among the series of disasters that have befallen her lately.
SNAP is the story of what happens next, when Frances is sentenced to community service and an anger-management class during which she finds an unexpected connection to two of her classmates, and after some frustration and much humour, their lives become transformed. It’s a hilarious and heartwarming story of justice and vengeance (and very annoying lapses in swimming pool etiquette), and I loved it through and through.
