The Snow Child: A Novel

Eowyn Ivey

Feb 2012 · Sold by Reagan Arthur Books

About this eBook

In this magical debut, a couple's lives are changed forever by the arrival of a little girl, wild and secretive, on their snowy doorstep.

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.

Ratings and reviews

It took me almost 200 pages to get into this book. Most of the plot was uninteresting and added little to capture the reader. I found the whole thing to be extremely generic... same old fairy tale ish story mixed with realistic fiction with the ending being boy falls in love with girl and so on. Very predictable moments. Ending wasn't awful, but not worth the time getting to.

This was a good book, the author is a great writer. I could really visualize her descriptions. In some places I thought I saw foreshadowing, but it didn't add up. It was kind of a strange story, I usually like books that weave fantasy with reality...I was dissappointed with the end I guess. I like a story that has a clear resolution. I don't like not knowing what really happened to Faina. I was also curious as to why the author chose never to put the dialogue with her in quotations.

First of all, the words gathered on these pages are mystifying in their simplicity, and spell-binding in their perfection. You see Alaska as if you were there, you smell the mountains as you feel the snowflakes touch your cheeks, and you find yourself making a mental note to put money away for that Alaskan cruise you've always wanted. And you hope to meet Mabel and Jack when you get there. It's sweet without being sappy, it's coarse without being crude. It's real life. And I can't wait to read it again.

About the author

Eowyn LeMay Ivey was raised in Alaska and continues to live there with her husband and two daughters. She received her BA in journalism and minor in creative writing through the honors program at Western Washington University, studied creative nonfiction at the University of Alaska Anchorage graduate program, and worked for nearly 10 years as an award-winning reporter at the Frontiersman newspaper. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Snow Child.