The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey, Book Review

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey Book Review

Eowyn Ivey’s debut novel The Snow Child (2012) is the retelling of a Russian folk tale of the Snow Child. As I have read the folk tale of Snow Child in the story book Alyonushka.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey, Book Review

This novel wrapped in a remote snow peppered tapestry spurs piquancy in my favour.

Raised in Alaska Eowyn Le May was an American writer who studied at Western Washington University in Bellingham. Her debut novel The Snow Child is set up in the background of snowflakes in Alaska.

Russian landscape with snow-covered mountain peaks white snow-covered branches of trees, fur coat warm haven letting with fire always keeps my imagination pinned to the pinnacle of mystery. I have read Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale. It also retells the Russian folktale story of the snow demon Morozko.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey, Book Review

“A girl. Let’s make it a little girl.”

After losing their newborn boy, Jack and Mabel moved to the solitary loveliness of snow-covered Alpine Leaving Pennsylvania. They gradually adjusted themselves to the life of slow sober grief and struggle of that desolate solitariness. One day out of fun the old couple made a female child out of the snow and decorated it with their love affection and the necessary equipment for winter red mittens and a scarf.

But with surprise, they found a little girl running through the snow-decked forest wearing those red mittens and scarf chasing foxes. She is Faina. She has lost her mother when she was a wee baby and her father after he drank a lot. Mabel’s imagination of the Snow child she read in the story shattered. But throughout the novel a shroud of mystery work. A conflict kept hanging over the protagonists and the readers whether Faina is a snow child or a flesh and blood human being.

Again and again, she flees to the forest, ignoring the old couple’s pleading to stay with them. Even Garret her soul mate and husband cannot withdraw her from her snow world. It appears that she breathes in the cold amidst the snow. She sustains there she belongs there. Even in her death, she proves that.

“Out here with the trees and the snow, I can breathe again.”

And Faina dissolves as she appears mysteriously. Is she that snow child made by the old couple from Mabel’s imagination or is she a lost orphan?

Alvina’s Verdict:

Though Ivey does her best to keep the suspense of Faina’s identity a dragging dilemma it is so wonderfully woven in the texture of the frosty fidget of the story’s plot. Again and again, the connection is drawn between two worlds: substantial and a fairyland.

I love to read such fantastic stories where imagination and mystery play their roles so accurately to drag the reader’s attention to the core of the plot as well as the characters.