PositiveHuffington PostEowyn Ivey’s debut novel, The Snow Child, is the stuff of folktale: a childless and struggling couple in 1920s Alaska build a little snowman, only to later find in its place a one-way trail of departing footprints and a blond-haired girl...the reader is drawn into an evocative confusion of reality and desire ... What Ivey does with her own retelling is a bit of the same magic the best of fairytales carries into our hearts ... Whimsical and melancholy, believable and not, The Snow Child is, at its generous heart, an honest exploration of the weight of grief and the saving grace of love.
Helen Rappaport
PositiveThe San Francisco Chronicle…an eclectic menagerie of foreign nationals on whose diaries, letters, press reports, recollections and memoirs Helen Rappaport draws for her lively and enlightening Caught in the Revolution … Rappaport has a terrific eye for the ironic … is particularly engaging when (as she did in The Romanov Sisters) she focuses on the oft-unheard women… while one might long for more Russian insights, the advertised view here is that of expats who could ultimately escape — without which the story would be left to victors who brooked no dissent … in this impeccably researched recounting we experience through foreigners the plight of Russians for whom ‘a “Free Russia” had real meaning’… Rappaport marvelously cages this history in a fiercely riveting narrative that provides much-needed insight into a country increasingly in our news.
