It's technically the first day of spring.

I say technically because as of yesterday, there's another foot of snow on the ground here.

So, with that in mind, I shall point you back to one of my earlier Kirkus columns. It's about Michael Northrop's Trapped, in which a group of teenagers get stuck in their high school during a blizzard:

Scholastic’s press kit describes Trapped as a cross between The Breakfast Club and The Shining. While that description works in a broad-strokes way—a group of teenagers, outwardly representative of different stereotypes, snowbound—in actuality, it doesn’t read like either. First, there’s a completely different dynamic, as there are two groups of friends and two outcasts, rather than five people mostly unknown to each other. And as much as I love The Breakfast Club, the interplay with the characters in Trapped—among the groups of characters and within the groups themselves—is more realistic, the bonding that occurs among them is more subtle, the moments of connection more tenuous, the conflict more believable.  

And, just for kicks (and to remind myself to get my hands on the prequel), I'll also point you back to my review of S.D. Crockett's After the Snow, which is set during an Ice Age in the not-so-distant future:

The pacing is good, the description strong, the characters believable, and the violence, while upsetting and gut-wrenching, isn't gratuitous. It's a vision of a post-apocalyptic future that touches on a lot of our current concerns—global warming, alternate energy, the oil crisis—while also taking a (pessimistic) stab at imagining what the global political landscape could look like in a few short decades.