The Snow Child

3.5 Stars
Eowyn Ivey

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.

I started reading this book because it was the December book for my book club. The pace in the beginning is rather slow in my opinion, I felt like it really dragged. At first neither Jack nor Mabel really made an impression or seemed to be interesting. When the first snow fell was really the beginning of the story for me. From there it really became interesting, when Faina came into the story she brought with her the life of the story well at least in my opinion. I was sad for Mabel and Jack for them not being able to have children and not being able to bridge that gap between them since the death of their baby. So when Faina came into their lives I thought it very fitting. Now I had never heard of the fairy tale the Snow Maiden before this book, so the author adding that Faina could possibly be the snow child seemed rather plausible to me (anything in the Alaskan wilderness seemed possible). The scenery had to be my favorite part of the book such vivid scenes of the Alaskan frontier I felt as though I could imagine being there. Anyways I felt the author did such a great job in building Faina into their lives and then letting her continue to grow and slowly become like their daughter. I also liked how Garret was "forced" to come work and then slowly also became like their own son. I don't want to give too much away so I'll stop while I'm ahead but it doesn't have fairy tale ending which is probably why I didn't give the book as high a rating (that and the fact it dragged in the beginning). This is a book that really seems to repeat the saying "If you love something, Set it free... If it comes back, it's yours, If it doesn't, it never was yours" I feel that this was the theme of the whole book circling Faina. What Faina did in the end to me was horrible and inexcusable I just can't believe she did it, but back to the theme "If you love something set it free..."