Book reviews by Mobilism's Book Review team
Dec 13th, 2014, 7:07 am
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TITLE: The Snow Child
AUTHOR: Eowyn Ivey
GENRE: Fiction, Literary
PUBLISHED: February 1, 2012
RATING: ★★★★★
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon.com
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism

Description: Pulitzer Prize in Letters: Fiction Finalist. 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.
"If Willa Cather and Gabriel Garcia Marquez had collaborated on a book, The Snow Child would be it. It is a remarkable accomplishment -- a combination of the most delicate, ethereal, fairytale magic and the harsh realities of homesteading in the Alaskan wilderness in 1918. Stunningly conceived, beautifully told, this story has the intricate fragility of a snowflake and the natural honesty of the dirt beneath your feet, the unnerving reality of a dream in the night. It fascinates, it touches the heart. It gallops along even as it takes time to pause at the wonder of life and the world in which we live. And it will stir you up and stay with you for a long, long time." - Robert Goolrick, New York Times bestselling author of A Reliable Wife

Review: The Snow Child, (based on an old Russian folk tale of the same name, this time expanded and brought to life in 1920's Alaska) is a lovely and unique combination of historical fiction, fairy tale, and literary fiction. Somehow the book manages to be magical and enchanting; yet also brutal, stark, and unforgiving. Its plot is solid, the writing stunningly beautiful and descriptive, the characters come alive on the page and in the reader's heart. Ivey is also able to maintain a very unique combination of themes throughout the novel: fairy tale, historical fiction, magical realism, a love story between a married couple, a tale of friendship, and a bleak frontier story.

In particular, for me, most The Snow Child's appeal is the marriage between the realism of the wilderness and the magic of a fairy tale. I was enticed by another novel that had similar themes, The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld, which novel combines the bleak and cold misery of a maximum security prison, complete with dark tales of desperate neglect and crime; and combined them enticingly with the magical realism and fantasy which took place in the haunting atmosphere of an old stone prison.

And just like The Enchanted, The Snow Child is also the author's first novel. After I read it, I felt I needed to know more about the author, and I quickly learned that Ivey was born, raised, and still lives in Alaska - and it certainly shows. The stark beauty of the Alaskan wilderness is presented very well and describes the lonely Alaska landscape perfectly...

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“As the glow of the cabin windows turned to flickers through the trees and then to black, her eyes adjusted and the starlight alone on the pure white snow was enough to light her way. The cold scorched her cheeks and her lungs, but she was warm in her fox hat and wool. An owl swooped through the spruce boughs, a slow-flying shadow, but she was not frightened. She felt old and strong, like the mountains and the river. She would find her way home.”

Jack and Mabel's initial pilgrimage to Alaska stemmed from a quiet, desperate sadness and alienation. Torn apart by grief, they try to make a fresh start in an isolated area far away from their friends and family in Philadelphia. Mabel had tried for many years to conceive, but had only conceived once, and lost their son before he was born. Mabel muses...
“She had watched other women with infants and eventually understood what she craved: the boundless permission-no, the absolute necessity- to hold and kiss and stroke this tiny person. Cradling a swaddled infant in their arms, mothers would distractedly touch their lips to their babies' foreheads. Passing their toddlers in a hall, mothers would tousle their hair even sweep them up in their arms and kiss them hard along their chins and necks until the children squealed with glee. Where else in life, Mabel wondered, could a woman love so openly and with such abandon?”

And then, just as everything seems to be hopeless and they consider giving up and moving back to Philadelphia, during a rare lighthearted evening playing outside, Jack and Mabel make a snow sculpture together in their yard. When they awake, a strange and ethereal young girl named Faina, appears outside and they begin to see her more often, sometimes accompanied by a red fox. Eventually she is able to come inside and stay with with them for short periods but disappears every summer and reappears in the winter.

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The presence of Faina in their home transforms them into a family, and awakens feelings between Jack and Mabel and their marriage grows stronger, their attempts at farming and homesteading improve, they make friends with a local family. Jack and Mabel start enjoying each other's company again...
“After all these years, still a spot within her fluttered at his touch, and his voice, throaty and hushed in her ear, tickled along her spine. Naked, they walked to the bedroom. Beneath the covers, they fumbled with each other’s bodies, arms and legs, backbones and hip bones, until they found the familiar, tender lines like the creases in an old map that has been folded and refolded over the years."

At first, no one but the two of them are able to see Faina - and where can she possibly be living when she isn't with them? Eventually, her neighbors meet Faina but their time with her is very limited as the girl seems shy. Uneasy, Mabel periodically remembers the story of the snow maiden who blesses the lives of an old childless couple. Is Faina flesh and blood, is she some sort of fairy or sprite - or does she only exist in their imaginations? Jack sees plenty of evidence Faina is a real girl, Mabel leans the other way, but still Mabel cannot shake her feeling of foreboding; no matter the version of the original snow child fable she hears, the story never has a happy ending.

Like most beautifully written literary fiction, this novel is worthy of 5 stars for its writing alone; a fantastic effort by a new writer. My two quibbles with this book are with its portrayal of Faina and with its ending. Although the mystery of Faina's origin was solved with fair certainty by mid-novel, there was always a frisson of doubt - we readers cling to the possibility of a fairy tale becoming their reality. The quality of magical realism was maintained throughout the novel; but is for this reason that Faina, unfortunately, becomes the weak link in the melancholy fragility portrayed in this book. And, rather sadly, this mystery prevents us from making any meaningful connection with her; I never did come to understand her at all.

The ending also disappointed me a bit. After Ivey spent so much time creating such a wonderful and wondrous balance of magic and reality, the ending falls flat. To have Faina suffer such a quick and humdrum fate in the last pages seems abrupt and unexpected. And yet. Still...

The sheer beauty and accomplishment of Ivey's gorgeous writing makes it difficult for me to award this novel any fewer than 5 full stars. An outstanding debut novel. I look forward to Ivey's next novel.
Dec 13th, 2014, 7:07 am
Dec 23rd, 2014, 4:04 pm
Right on the money with this. Although, I feel this review is a bit too spoilery for people who have not read the book yet.
The Snow Child was easily the most profound and beautiful book I read in 2013. I had my own hopes and dreams for the ending...and at first, it left me a little soured...but over time, I accepted it as it was.
Now I feel like re-reading this one again.
Dec 23rd, 2014, 4:04 pm