It's difficult to know where to begin when talking about The Book of the Snowstorm's framing narrative. For one, it's the longest "short story" in the book. It's done in sections, and some of these sections almost amount to short stories in of themselves. It's charming and alongside The Cactus and the Corpse is almost singlehandedly responsible for investing me in the Coloth series. Not that I needed much persuasion.

The highest compliment I can give this framing narrative is that I was never disappointed when it came back. It was certainly one of the things that kept me reading and not giving up (out of laziness rather than boredom, I'm bad at long books) at some point in the 800 page brick of a book. It's also one of two stories in the entire book that is also unapologetically a Coloth story. So it's doubly important because it has to make the guy on the cover matter to you in what is legitimately a book of random vignettes.

It largely succeeds, but it doesn't make it any less weird for how little the Coloth book has to do with the Coloth guy. A lot of these sections are Maritsa and Callum just opening the next book, and their banter with those in the library is continually charming. The gags are very funny too. But this is in the inbetween space between stories and some of the time it's unimportant and some of the time it's very important. It's hard to know whether to treat this as seriously as a proper novel (no, it's mostly characters opening books) or a short story (no, it's really long and done in chapters) so I'm just going to say it's good and leave it at that.