Monday, July 13, 2015

The Snow Child

The Snow Child
Eowyn Ivey

The Snow Child

Genre:  Historical Fiction

Summary (from Goodreads): 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.
 
Review:  I loved the descriptions of living in Alaska and the beautiful imagery of winter; it made me feel cold and even long for winter's beauty.  This book focused on characters rather than action, and each of the main characters, as well as the secondary characters, were well drawn and sympathetic.  I think my problem with this book was that I couldn't figure out whether it was supposed to be a fairy tale or whether it was supposed to be realistic. 

Rating: 3.5 stars

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