The Snow Child

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

About The Book:

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.

My Thoughts:

You would not generally describe a book about homesteading in the 1920's as magical. But this is what the book is! Magical, in so many ways. It starts off a bit slow, but then it moves along so well, that you are in the story, you are right there with the characters and can experience what the characters experience. This book connects to me deeper than any book has in a long time. It has heartbreaking loss in it, which I have experienced, and it also has unwavering love, which I too have been fortunate enough to experience. A story that will stick with you for days after you read it.

About The Author:

Eowyn (pronounced A-o-win) Ivey was raised in Alaska and continues to live there with her husband and two daughters. Her mother named her after a character from J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Eowyn works at the independent bookstore Fireside Books where she plays matchmaker between readers and books. The Snow Child is her debut novel. The Snow Child is informed by Eowyn's life in Alaska. Her husband is a fishery biologist with the state of Alaska. While they both work outside of the home, they are also raising their daughters in the rural, largely subsistence lifestyle in which they were both raised. As a family, they harvest salmon and wild berries, keep a vegetable garden, turkeys and chickens, and they hunt caribou and moose for meat. Because they don't have a well and live outside any public water system, they haul water each week for their holding tank and gather rainwater for their animals and garden. Their primary source of home heat is a woodstove, and they harvest and cut their own wood. These activities are important to Eowyn's day-to-day life as well as the rhythm of her year. To learn more about her life in Alaska, visit her blog Letters from Alaska at lettersfromalaska.wordpress.com.

Buy this book at The Snow Child on Amazon.

I received a complimentary review copy of this book from Hachette Book Group. All thoughts and opinions are my own.