The Snow Child

Novel by Eowyn Ivey

I should mention that I just this second finished reading this book, and I wish you were sitting with me in my family room under my Very Hungry Caterpillar quilt to talk it over with me. And I wish that you would have brought cheesecake. But cake aside, I really want to talk about this book, so I will be forcing it into the hands of my dear friend and book-soul-mate, who is visiting for New Year's. I could talk about it with my mom, who gave it to me, but she's probably already read three other books and forgotten what this one is about. So for now there is you, dear book club friend, even if you have not yet read it.

The Snow Child is a fairy tale for adults, set in Alaska in the 1920s. An older couple, childless and sad, has come to farm the wilderness and escape from their sadness. We all know that doesn't really work, except that they make a few new friends, and one crazy night, a snow girl, who becomes real. Maybe. Or maybe she's an orphan surviving alone in the woods. Either way, she saves them and they care for her. Part (dare I say it) magical realism, part Jack London story, totally engrossing.

There is something haunting in this book. The descriptions of the animals as both vividly beautiful and as meat get under my skin. It's so raw. There's also an element of foreboding the whole time; I was holding my breath waiting for something bad to happen. Maybe it's the foretelling of the snow girl's fate at the beginning of the book, or the harsh reality of the Alaskan wilderness. I also noticed about halfway through that the regular dialogue is punctuated normally, but all dialogue with the snow girl has no quotation marks. It's unsettling, like having conversations in your head. My mom said she read this book at our family's cabin, but I'm glad I read it here at home with my large, bat-wielding husband nearby. It's beautifully creepy and invokes the cabin fever that is mentioned frequently. I would guess that tone is intentional. Worked on me.

Interestingly, there is an element of this story that echoes the last book I read, in the examination of motherhood. Both the birth of a child and the loss of a child in this book change who the women are, both in the roles they play and in how they identify themselves. It's a theme that comes up so much in what I read, as does the loss of children and pregnancy in general. I think women are striving to make sense of who we are, with and without children. How it's handled is so different book to book, though. There are some books with pregnancy loss that I would NEVER recommend to a pregnant mother but this one I would. The loss isn't the central story, and there is redemption in it as well.

BTW--do you think the author's name is pronounced like that girl warrior in the Lord of the Rings books (which I have never read, much to the chagrin of my husband)? If so, she must be pretty badass.

To Die For: A Novel of Anne Boleyn

Historical Fiction by Sandra Byrd

Fair warning: I can't say anything bad about this book. I met the writer so now it's personal. It would be like saying my friend's baby wasn't cute (and I really mean that only as a metaphor, friends, your babies are all cute).

Last month my mom invited me to a book talk at our public library, where Sandra Byrd was promoting her newest book, The Secret Keeper: A Novel of Catherine Parr (Henry VIII's last wife), which is sort of a sequel to this one. Sandra showed a very informative slideshow about the Tudors and then took questions, at which time my mom proceeded to embarrass me by telling Sandra I was writing a novel, and then make up for it by buying me two books. I'm easy that way.

So this is the first in a series of three she calls the Ladies in Waiting Books, about Tudor queens (the next one due out is about Queen Elizabeth, who was Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn's daughter). They are all from the perspective of a historically real but little known lady in waiting for the queen of the day, this one being Meg Wyatt, best friend to Anne Boleyn. I got kind of tired of Anne Boleyn after the hype about The Other Boleyn Sister but this book is refreshingly different.  That's because it's not from the point of view of the royals, and because there is an element of faith interwoven into Meg's story, and because even though Anne dies, there is a happy ending for some.

What I thought about most while reading was the element of childbirth in the story and in women's lives at the time. So often in the book, a woman's fate depended on whether she had borne children. Some were shunned for being unable to have children. Some had to marry a despised man because their children would join two great estates. Some just plain died in childbirth. In Anne's case, she was beheaded because she didn't have any male children. I am thankful today that my marital and financial future don't depend on my children or their gender, but still. I think for women today there is still the sense that our lives rise and fall based on our ability to have children. As I was discussing with a friend recently, some of us are desperate to have children and can't, some are having children when they are unprepared, and some experience both in the span of just a few years. Our lives are tied to our fertility still, five hundred years after this story occurred.

Sorry if that was a little heavy. I'll try to read something with less death and destruction next time. And by the way, I got the message: there will be no more book club posts about Rick Riordan books. The more I post about him, the fewer readers I have. Sheesh.