The Snow Child

“She could not fathom the hexagonal miracle of snowflakes formed from clouds, crystallized fern and feather that tumble down to light on a coat sleeve, white stars melting even as they strike. How did such force and beauty come to be in something so small and fleeting and unknowable? You did not have to understand miracles to believe in them, and in fact Mabel had come to suspect the opposite. To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as you were able before it slipped like water between your fingers.”

Beautifully written story based on a Russian fairytale, Mabel and Jack attempt to make a living off the land in the rugged Alaskan wilderness in the 1920s. show more They are childless, having experienced a stillbirth. One evening, at the first snowfall, they build a snow-girl, and the next day a child appears running through the woods. Is she real or mutually imagined?

I enjoyed the way the author portrays the harsh reality of life in the Alaskan wilderness against the whimsical nature of the child in the woods. Mabel and Jack question the reality of events, and the reader guesses right along with them. There are multiple ways to interpret this story.

The girl appears to exist in the real world and the fantasy-imaginative world simultaneously. It seemed to have a sliding scale between reality and fantasy. As I read this book, I could, at various times, make a case for either possibility. One thing is clear – the snow girl changes the lives of everyone she encounters.

4.5 show less

Ivey's stunning debut novel is set in Alaska in the 1920s, where middle-aged couple Jack and Mabel are struggling to survive on their new homestead. While Jack is breaking his back every day trying to clear enough land to establish a farm, Mabel is quietly wilting under the winter sun and grieving for the stillborn baby that has prevented her ever having a child of her own. The only solace in this lonely existence is the rowdy Benson family on the next homestead - jovial George, his earthy wife Esther and their three sons.

Then one night, during the first snow of the winter and in a moment of giddy high spirits, Jack and Mabel build a little girl out of snow outside their cabin. The next morning, to their dismay, the girl has been show more knocked down and Mabel's scarf and mittens are gone. Soon afterwards they catch a glimpse of a small girl flitting through the forest with a red fox in tow, and they are mystified. Is this the girl they created together, come alive through their shared longing for a child? Or is she just a little girl in need, trying to survive in the wilderness by herself? And so Faina comes into their lives, changing their world forever...

It is an absolutely beautiful book, and well on track to be one of my favourites of this year. It's not a fast-paced story, but one that I wanted to savour and enjoy, page by page. Ivey's descriptions made me feel like I was there in the cabin and walking through the woods with her characters; I could feel the chill in the air, smell the spruce trees and taste the snow on the breeze. I think one of the things I liked best about the book was its tenderness and humanity. There were moments that made me smile, moments that made me sigh, and moments that made me well up. Every character pulled me in so that I was utterly invested in their happiness and wellbeing, and every conversation and interaction is rooted in such deep emotional awareness that it felt pitch-perfect and utterly real.

Alongside this, of course, was the magical presence of Faina herself. She is such an ethereally beautiful character, yet also strong and brutally capable, so that the reader, like Jack and Mabel, never knows quite what to make of her. I like that this magical element - based on a Russian fairytale - is written with a very gentle touch, so that it never feels implausible and the reader is left to come to their own conclusions. Highly recommended to readers who like their books to be firmly rooted in human relationships, who appreciate being able to a get a real sense of place as they read, and who enjoy authors like Alice Hoffman and Sarah Addison Allen who interweave their novels with a thread of magic and wonder. Read it! show less

This was an achingly, deliciously melancholy book. As I read it, it was late January and then early February, and it made me appreciate the sights and smells of ice and snow, and the sad beauty of it all.

The perspective shifts effortlessly and satisfyingly between Mabel and her husband Jack, and very occasionally to others of the very limited cast. Ivey evokes the abyssal divide that can exist even between long-married people, between you and someone you love more than anything, like the foot of ice between you and the running river water. You can see it clearly, but there is a cold and firm distance.

Read this to remember that even those closest to you are wholly their own, and are unraveling the mystery of you just as you try to show more unravel the mystery of them, but love can exist despite that mystery never quite being unwound. show less

Inspired by folktales about the Snow Child, such as Arthur Ransome’s “The Little Daughter of the Snow,” and the Russian Snegurochka, or the Snow Maiden, this is a beautiful story about a childless couple homesteading in Alaska who discover (or create?) a girl who lives in the snowy Alaskan wilds. They eventually gain her trust, but she is at home in the forest, and they only see her in the winter after the first snowfall.

Jack and Mabel lost their first child and came to Alaska for a fresh start as a response to their grief, so they are more than willing to accept Faina, the snow child, on her own terms as a kind of surrogate daughter.

Slow, gentle, and beautiful, this novel brought to my mind Robert Frost’s “The Hill Wife.” show more This is less a fantasy or traditional fairytale retelling than an adult story about a marriage and a family, and about love and grief and loneliness and the beauty and hardship of homesteading in the Alaskan wilderness. show less

The Snow Child is an extraordinary blend of fiction and fantasy. Yet, the issues played out against this setting convey a harsh reality – a childless couple dealing with their feelings of inadequacy as they brave a new life in the Alaskan Territory. This is the frontier territory of the 1920’s, where the climate is severe and few homesteaders’ realized success. These conditions, and the events the middle-aged pair experience in their new home, lie symbolically parallel to the psychological drama that plagues this infertile couple.

The real elements of this story are not to be confused with literary realism. For literary realism negates the fairy tale. A fairy tales implies overcoming obstacles in order to live happily ever after, show more where realism absconds with this notion – all is as is and nothing more. The author uses the fairy tale framework to illustrate hope – the very thing lacking in the couples lives.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. It was enchanting and chimerical, but not to excess; its context blurring the lines between the real and the unreal. Faina (the Snow Child) exemplifies the magical human being set within a fairy tale: a supernatural and spirited child with an impish character, uncanny knowledge and the ability to intercede with normal human affairs. Snow Child is a poignant and captivating novel filled with beautiful imagery and charm. show less

Magical realism meets Nanook of the North in this story of a sad, childless couple in their fifties who move to Alaska in 1920 from their home in Pennsylvania to try and escape the utter sadness in their lives after a late-conceived child dies at birth. When we first meet Jack and Mable, their lives don't seem very much improved by the move. Jack has stoically tried to carve a farm out of the Alaskan wilderness, but with his age and little help he doesn't seem to be making much progress and is thinking of working in a coal mine over the winter in order to keep food on their table.. Mable is on the brink of despair and, in the early pages of the book, walks out onto the river hoping that she will fall through thin ice and kill herself. show more

Help comes from two sources. First, their kindly neighbors, the Bensons, offered them the much-needed gift of friendship,and needed physicsal health. Then, in a moment of rare levity on the night of the first snowfall, Jack and Mable build a snow girls outside their cabin. The next morning, the snow figure is gone and they see a young girl running through their trees in the woods. Over time, the little girl, called Faina, becomes the child they never had.

But is Faina real, or is she a magical creation of the snow figures they built on that first night of winter? The reader is kept guessing until the end of the book, but the other real magic is how Jack and Mable both grow as people learning to love again: each other, their friends the Bensons, the wild and beautiful Alaskan wilderness and the strange ethereal girl who has come into their lives. show less

“She could not fathom the hexagonal miracle of snowflakes formed from clouds, crystallized fern and feather that tumble down to light on a coat sleeve, white stars melting even as they strike. How did such force and beauty come to be in something so small and fleeting and unknowable? You did not have to understand miracles to believe in them, and in fact Mabel had come to suspect the opposite. To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as you were able before it slipped like water between your fingers.”

Beautifully written story based on a Russian fairytale, Mabel and Jack attempt to make a living off the land in the rugged Alaskan wilderness in the 1920s. show more They are childless, having experienced a stillbirth. One evening, at the first snowfall, they build a snow-girl, and the next day a child appears running through the woods. Is she real or mutually imagined?

I enjoyed the way the author portrays the harsh reality of life in the Alaskan wilderness against the whimsical nature of the child in the woods. Mabel and Jack question the reality of events, and the reader guesses right along with them. There are multiple ways to interpret this story.

The girl appears to exist in the real world and the fantasy-imaginative world simultaneously. It seemed to have a sliding scale between reality and fantasy. As I read this book, I could, at various times, make a case for either possibility. One thing is clear – the snow girl changes the lives of everyone she encounters.

4.5 show less