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.