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.
Reviews -
"Ivey's prose is beautiful and precise...Magical...As real and mysterious as winter's first snowflake."― Buzzy Jackson, Boston Globe
"The real magic of The Snow Child is that it's never as simple as it seems, never moves exactly in the direction you think it must...Sad as the story often is, with its haunting fairy-tale ending, what I remember best are the scenes of unabashed joy."― Ron Charles, Washington Post
"Full of wonder, longing, hope, pain, and beauty...The Snow Child will keep you frozen in its spell until the very last word."― Sarah Willis, Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Ivey sets up the two most powerful forces in any story: fear on the one hand, potential for the miraculous on the other."― Susan Salter Reynolds, Newsday
"A magical yet brutally realistic tale."― Karen Holt, O, the Oprah Magazine
"Bewitching."― Meganne Fabrega, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Captivating."― San Francisco Chronicle
"Spellbinding."― Gill Hudson, Reader's Digest
"If Willa Cather and Gabriel Garcia Marquez had collaborated on a book, THE SNOW CHILD would be it. It is a remarkable accomplishment -- a combination of the most delicate, ethereal, fairytale magic and the harsh realities of homesteading in the Alaskan wilderness in 1918. Stunningly conceived, beautifully told, this story has the intricate fragility of a snowflake and the natural honesty of the dirt beneath your feet, the unnerving reality of a dream in the night. It fascinates, it touches the heart. It gallops along even as it takes time to pause at the wonder of life and the world in which we live. And it will stir you up and stay with you for a long, long time."― Robert Goolrick, New York Times bestselling author of A Reliable Wife
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.
Reviews -
"Ivey's prose is beautiful and precise...Magical...As real and mysterious as winter's first snowflake."― Buzzy Jackson, Boston Globe
"The real magic of The Snow Child is that it's never as simple as it seems, never moves exactly in the direction you think it must...Sad as the story often is, with its haunting fairy-tale ending, what I remember best are the scenes of unabashed joy."― Ron Charles, Washington Post
"Full of wonder, longing, hope, pain, and beauty...The Snow Child will keep you frozen in its spell until the very last word."― Sarah Willis, Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Ivey sets up the two most powerful forces in any story: fear on the one hand, potential for the miraculous on the other."― Susan Salter Reynolds, Newsday
"A magical yet brutally realistic tale."― Karen Holt, O, the Oprah Magazine
"Bewitching."― Meganne Fabrega, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Captivating."― San Francisco Chronicle
"Spellbinding."― Gill Hudson, Reader's Digest
"If Willa Cather and Gabriel Garcia Marquez had collaborated on a book, THE SNOW CHILD would be it. It is a remarkable accomplishment -- a combination of the most delicate, ethereal, fairytale magic and the harsh realities of homesteading in the Alaskan wilderness in 1918. Stunningly conceived, beautifully told, this story has the intricate fragility of a snowflake and the natural honesty of the dirt beneath your feet, the unnerving reality of a dream in the night. It fascinates, it touches the heart. It gallops along even as it takes time to pause at the wonder of life and the world in which we live. And it will stir you up and stay with you for a long, long time."― Robert Goolrick, New York Times bestselling author of A Reliable Wife