The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey is
delightful but not without faults. The novel follows the lives of Mabel and
John, two Alaskan homesteaders. Their lives are hard—Alaska is barren, and they
tend rough land and hunt for food. They are also childless, a fact that has
created a great rift between them. Their lives are very desolate at the
beginning of the novel. They have little interaction with each other or anyone
else. As the novel progresses, however, they befriend their neighbors, Esther
and George, and taheir sons.
The crux of the novel, though, is the story of little Faina, a girl who appears one night in their yard after they build a snow child on their lawn in the first flurry of the season. Faina’s story is part harsh reality, part mysticism, and the girl quickly becomes like a child to the old couple. Mabel believes she is a snow child, like that in a story she heard as a child. The girl appears to walk on snow without really sinking in; she cannot stand the heat and disappears every year at the end of winter. Remarkably, she can survive alone in the brutal Alaskan wilderness. To John, Faina appears a feral child. He knows that her father is dead, for the child lead John to her father’s lifeless body one day. As the novel progresses, Mabel and John’s opinion of Faina change and change again. The reader is left wondering: how mystical and magical is the child? And how fallibly real is she?
There are some great things about this novel. The story of John, Mabel, and Faina is mimetic of the tale that Mabel knew as a child—that of an old couple who builds a snow child only to have her come to life but disappear every spring. This feature is interesting, and I enjoyed some of the underlying criticism of fairy tales (they are often very cruel even though they are meant for children). The characters, although a bit stereotypical at times, are enjoyable. The portrait of Alaskan homesteading was particularly fascinating for me, since it is a part of American history I knew nothing about.
I spent a long time trying to figure out what was “wrong” with the novel. As I was reading it, I knew it had shortcomings but couldn’t totally pinpoint them. I think, however, it lies in the fact that at times the dialogue seemed a bit stale or halted. Sometimes I wondered if this was just supposed to be halted because of the time period of the novel and the way people spoke back then, but I am not sure. Ivey did a pretty good job with everything else. Like I said, at times the characters seemed stereotypical, but they rounded themselves out as the novel progressed, although perhaps not as fully as they could have. The final portion of the story seemed a little too rushed, and the first part a little too slow. The pacing simply needed a small shift.
In spite of my criticisms, I did enjoy The Snow Child. If you like fantasy novels that have mere elements of magic and not a completely transformed world, I would recommend this book.
