Title: The Snow Child Author: Eowyn Ivey
Published: November 6, 2012
Genre(s): Historical Fiction
Page Count: 390
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart—he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone—but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees.
This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.
Eowyn Ivey’s debut is a haunting, ethereal fairytale set in the harsh Alaskan frontier. With prose that betrays natural talent, the author reveals the landscape of Alaskan winters and twists a story that hints constantly toward fables and magical realism. This is not a book I’ll soon forget.
Ivey’s protagonists, Jack and Mabel, are nearing their fifties. They have no children, and they’ve moved to Alaska to get away. When they build a snow-girl who seems to have come to life, it’s like she’s the child they could never have. The girl, Faina, is mysterious and half-feral, but enchanting and always surprising. Jack and Mabel’s lives become focused on Faina, even though it seems the girl will never be “domesticated”.
What I really like about The Snow Child is that even though Jack and Mabel and Faina are the protagonists, they’re not exactly the main character. I felt that much of the story taking place was secondary to the setting. Alaska, in and of itself, has become a dominant, ever-present character in Ivey’s book. I liked Jack and Mabel and Faina; I was interested in where the story would take them. But I was most in awe of how the author turned nature into such a strong presence in the text.
And the story itself was good. Faina’s character always had a hint of magic and mystery to it, and I loved the fairytale-like atmosphere that pervaded The Snow Child. The way her actions wove into Jack and Mabel’s life, the way she seemed to become their reason for living, was cleverly and subtly done. She was a very unique character, and I thought Ivey did a good job in making her human while making sure she had a quality of otherness about her.
What I really didn’t like, however, was the epilogue. As a general rule, I think prologues and epilogues are uneccessary fillers that rarely add anything of value to the story. If they did have value, they’d be in the actual story, wouldn’t they? The Snow Child’s epilogue, stylistically speaking, really ruined the impact and power of the final scene. In my opinion. I seriously could have done without it.
Even so, if the only complaint I have is about the epilogue, then that’s not very many complaints, is it? The Snow Child was a breathtakingly engrossing, always unique novel that captured the Alaskan landscape as a breathing character. Eowyn Ivey did such an amazing job with this book.
