Author: Eowyn Ivey
Title: The Snow Child
Year of publication: 2012
Page count: 401
Rating: ★★★★
The Snow Child is a magical novel filled with yearning, hope, sorrow, joy, beauty, and wonder; it’s Eowyn Ivey’s debut, and was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
It’s strongly influenced by Snegurochka, a character in Russian fairytales—in some versions, she is the daughter of Father Frost and Spring, while in others, she is a snow child made by an elderly childless couple and then magically brought to life—which is mainly the version Ivey went for, reimagining the original fairy tale in 1920s Alaska. She was born, raised, and still lives there, and the love she holds for the Land shines through with her every word, and was the most wonderful thing about the novel for me—her prose is both lively and cold, just as I imagine Alaskan wilderness to be.
Her writing is poetic and dances on the edge between fairytale and magical realism, and the whole novel is permeated by an icy, sad mood that it never quite shakes, even when nothing sad is happening. This is partly because she describes the cold and cruel (but beautiful) scenery so well, but mostly because of how she manages to capture the quiet and desperate longing and loneliness of a couple who has grown apart because of their grief and unfulfilled wish for a child. Instead of reaching out to each other to cope with the loss of their baby together, Mabel and Jack withdrew from one another and the world, starting a new life on an isolated homestead. The strength of the novel is the description of this alienation, and the slow and tender rekindling of a love turned quiet after twenty years of marriage. I loved the bittersweet tone of the novel, it was the perfect thing to read during a few snowed-in days in that weird time of year between Christmas and New Year’s, when Time stops working the way we are used to.
Ultimately, I think the book is about being true to oneself, but also about finding compromises for the ones you love without giving up on your own needs and desires, as well as a warning that running away from your problems and bottling up emotions never works out.
*** SKIP PARAGRAPH TO AVOID SPOILERS ***
While I think that the ending is good (and the only thing that could/should’ve happened), I still didn’t particularly like the turn the story took about halfway, where it dropped from an almost full five stars to three. I didn’t like the marriage and pregnancy storylines, although that was another nod to one of the fairytale versions, and, for Mabel and Jack, a lesson in letting go (of Faina as a child/her innocence).
*** END OF SPOILERS ***
Faina’s character is surrounded by the ambiguity of who or what she is—an abandoned, homeless orphan, or a magical being brought to life by the old couple’s longing? The mysterious aura is upheld well throughout the book (for instance, her dialogue doesn’t have any quotation marks), but it’s so well-done that I could never fully connect with her character. I assume that this was intended—the story’s focus isn’t (or shouldn’t be) Faina and what the reader feels for her, but rather what Jack and Mabel project onto her.
”All her life she had believed in something more, in the mystery that shape-shifted at the edge of her senses. It was the flutter of moth wings on glass and the promise of river nymphs in the dappled creek beds. It was the smell of oak trees on the summer evening she fell in love, and the way dawn threw itself across the cow pond and turned the water to light.
Mabel could not remember the last time she caught such a flicker.”
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