The Snow Child - Eowyn Ivey

Written by Eowyn Ivey
Read by Thérèse Plummer
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Release date: July 31, 2018
Duration: 10:57:31

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, a couple in their early 50s , take advantage of cheap land to build a homestead in Alaska in the 1920s. 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, blond-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.

A review…The mystery of Faina’s provenance, along with the way she brightens the couple’s lives, gives the novel’s early chapters a slightly magical-realist cast. Yet as Faina’s identity grows clearer, the narrative also becomes a more earthbound portrait of the Alaskan wilderness and a study of the hard work involved in building a family. Ivey’s style is spare and straightforward, in keeping with the novel’s setting, and she offers enough granular detail about hunting and farming to avoid familiar pieties about the Last Frontier. The book’s tone throughout has a lovely push and pull–Alaska’s punishing landscape and rough-hewn residents pitted against Faina’s charmed appearances–and the ending is both surprising and earned. A fine first novel that enlivens familiar themes of parenthood and battles against nature.