My first thought upon reading a few chapters of The Snow Child was: “This is like a depressing version of Little House in the Big Woods.”  But oh, it quickly became much more than that.  Jack and Mabel are an aging couple who have never been able to have children.  They moved to Alaska to escape the judging, pitying eyes of friends and relations who wonder why they have remained a family of two, and to be alone with their sadness.  But Jack and Mabel aren’t alone for long.  One night they build a little girl out of snow, and soon after, a real, live, flesh and blood little girl appears in their yard.  Faina, as they come to know her, is the orphaned daughter of a trapper, who flits through the forest, dancing atop the snow, killing small animals for her meals and migrating north when spring thaws the fertile Alaskan valleys.  At first Faina is afraid of Jack and Mabel, but they give her space and she gradually grows closer and closer to them, until they come to love her as a daughter and she to consider them her parents.  But Faina is growing up, and Jack and Mabel begin to dread the day when they will lose the only child they’ve ever had.

This book.  Was.  Incredible.  The language is so evocative, so transforming, that I felt as though I could see Faina’s tiny child-sized footprints in the crystalline Alaska snow.  I cried in the beginning, middle, and ends of this book – Jack and Mabel’s grief at not being able to have children of their own, their love for Faina, their struggles to survive in the wilderness of Alaska, their fear that Faina will melt away like the snow maiden in the old Russian fairy tale… are all portrayed with such realism, such sensitivity, that I was a weepy mess throughout the story.  But please, please don’t let that dissuade you from reading this wonderful sob-fest!  Pick it up for the quality of the writing alone, if for no other reason.  Pick it up so that you can feel rich soil and feathery snowflakes and cold Alaskan streams, even while all you’re holding is paper.  This book is destined to be a treasure of magical realism, maybe even a classic someday.  I for one will be waiting anxiously for Eowyn Ivey’s next book.

Read it: The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey (not an affiliate link)

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