A childless couple forms a girl from snow and, in answer to their longing, she comes to life. That’s essentially what happens in Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, but the author has transported the story to her native Alaska and fleshed it out with an endearing set of characters ... Whether she really exists or not, Faina, as they eventually call her, will capture your imagination just as she captures Jack and Mabel’s...[Faina is] another in the growing crowd of fiercely independent girls we’ve seen in recent fiction including Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones ... Although Ivey teases us with surreal elements, they remain an elusive scent in these pages, which are grounded in the deadly but gorgeous Alaskan landscape ... Sad as the story often is, with its haunting fairy-tale ending, what I remember best are the scenes of unabashed joy. That isn’t a feeling literary fiction seems to have much use for, but Ivey conveys surprising moments of happiness with such heartfelt conviction.
The Snow Child is a reimagining of the Russian fairy tale “Snegurochka,’’ or “The Snow Maiden,’’ about an elderly couple who yearn for a child ... Ivey’s prose is beautiful and precise; her descriptions of the landscape evoke a wilderness that changes with the weather and reflects the emotional state of the people who live there ... It is Mabel, not the snow child, whose story is the heart of the book. Ivey’s portrait of this middle-age woman is loving and complex ... Mabel is not just a woman who longs for a child; she is a woman who longs to find her purpose in life. This is the source of her saudade, and through Ivey’s magical telling, her longing feels as real and mysterious as the winter’s first snowflake.
A sad tale's best for winter, as Shakespeare wrote. The Snow Child, a first novel by a native Alaskan journalist and bookseller named Eowyn Ivey, suggests that if you face winter head-on — as do the childless homesteaders, Mabel and Jack, in this story about life on our northernmost frontier in the 1920s — you may find more hope after sadness than you had ever imagined ... Ivey's delightful invention hovers somewhere between myth and naturalism — and the effect this creates is mesmerizing ... Like Faina, the novel itself emerges lifelike and credible, with a delicate interface between fantastic story and realism that catches a reader's imagination from the beginning. Ivey describes an Alaska landscape that's harsh but wonderfully beautiful ... This terrific novelistic debut will convince you that in some cases, a fantastic story — with tinges of sadness and a mysterious onward-pulsing life force — may be best for this, or any, season.
The best thing about The Snow Child – what sets it apart from genre fiction and keeps you reading – is the way Ivey declines to lay her cards on the table. Are we dealing with fantasy or reality here? Is the girl magical, or flesh and blood? We're no more sure than Jack and Mabel ... [Ivey] is a careful, matter-of-fact writer, who, thankfully, doesn't resort to unnecessary poetics or artificial ratcheting-up of tension. This leaves your imagination free to hare off down as many trails as you like ... Ivey touches on the question of what it means to be a parent – the impossible desire to capture and tame the very thing you must set free – but only fleetingly, with more imagery than depth. This is pure storytelling, refreshingly ungilded and sympathetic, but little more.
...Ivey’s story builds like a snowfall, with steady confidence, until you find yourself deep in magic realism. As the story progresses, you notice that when Mabel and Jack speak with Faina, the snow child, there are no quotation marks. Is the author suggesting that the couple is imagining her? Faina visits when the snow has made the world new, more beautiful and quiet, a version of the world Jack and Mabel want to believe in. ... In the end though, Eowyn Ivey draws us into the lean and wild world of the Alaskan wilderness beautifully in this novel. She loves the magical snow child she has created. Many readers will love her as well.
...a novel of which one enthusiastic blurber was moved to say: 'If Willa Cather and Gabriel García Márquez had collaborated on a book, The Snow Child would be it' ... Faina, a winsome blonde child with a fox for a friend, emerges from the woods to bewitch them both. The central tension of the novel is Faina's existential status: Is she an actual child living off the land, a small ambulatory snow goon, or the product of lonely imaginations? ... the reader know that they are either in magical territory, crazytown, or somewhere in between ... The Snow Child is a totally unobjectionable novel with good pacing and a pretty set, but it is not a revelation of content or style or form ... This little snowflake of a book melts away before your eyes.
Eowyn 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.
But there’s no happily-ever-after in Eowyn Ivey’s debut novel, as with the Russian folktale it’s based on. Its charm lies in blending beauty, magic, and happiness with tragedy in a way that merges fantasy with the hardships of real life ... The mystery feels less important than Ivey’s character portraits. The story spans more than a decade, and provides lovely looks at the comforts of old relationships and the fire of new love ... The folktale of an old man and woman who make a child out of snow has many different endings. All of them are told early in The Snow Child, giving the ending a feeling of heavy-handed inevitability.
