The Snow Child

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Ivey, Eowyn	4-week checkout	Due 05-19-2024
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Fantasy / Ivey, Eowyn	4-week checkout	Due 05-18-2024
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Fantasy / Ivey, Eowyn	4-week checkout	Due 05-16-2024

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.--From Amazon.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Delightful Alaskan adventure submitted by LVDS on March 19, 2013, 10:23am Delightful, heartwarming, yet melancholic story set in realistic Alaskan frontier 100 years ago.

Lovely submitted by romanticmind on July 11, 2015, 10:53am One of the most moving books I've read in awhile. Magical, yet firmly grounded in reality, this book was a treat!

All tell, but interesting nonetheless submitted by Susan4Pax -prev. sueij- on July 20, 2018, 11:41pm So, here's my dilemma with this book: I've always heard that the best advice to authors is "show, don't tell." That is, if you want me to know that a character is sad, don't tell me that they're sad, rather, have them do the things that a sad person does.

So how does an author show everything in a story where the two main characters have a relationship that is basically so broken that they don't talk to each other? Where they hardly know each other? Where they live an isolated life in Alaska in the 1920's? What else is there but tell and tell and tell and tell?

The idea of _The Snow Child_ was an interesting one, and eventually the story itself wrapped me in enough that I could ignore that it was told through tell and tell and tell and tell. But I did not particularly enjoy the telling.

Magical story submitted by alisonhatch94 on August 6, 2020, 9:21pm I absolutely loved this story and the characters in it. Her descriptions of Alaska are so magical and make you want to go there even with the cold and darkness. I loved the story between the couple and how you see their relationship develop throughout the book. It was really captivating and mysterious and it's now one of my favorite fantasy type books.

resilience and touches of joy submitted by camelsamba on August 11, 2022, 11:20pm I listened to this twice. Parts of it are achingly beautiful - a particular description of the aurora borealis, the first coat and the wedding dress. Parts are achingly sad. But running through is an undercurrent of resilience and touches of joy.