The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

Previously published in the Herald magazine. 

Eowyn Ivey’s debut is sure to move a dozen emotional reviewers to spout elaborate descriptions containing words like ‘heartbreaking’, ‘breathtaking’, ‘eerie’, ‘evocative’ and ‘atmospheric.’  Of course, they would be quite right – it is indeed all of the above. Of course, that does not make it good. It just makes it all of the above.

The Snow Child is set in Alaska of the 1920s, where homesteaders are living through nightmarishly long frozen winters in the hope of being able to live off the land in the summer. Jack and Mabel are a pair of such homesteaders, but foolishly moved toAlaskapast their prime. Jack is almost too old to be farming the unforgiving land alone and Mabel remains traumatized from an earlier miscarriage. Of course, the landscape is bleak, cold and unfriendly – their relationship is much the same. Jack is slowly being broken – physically, emotionally – by the burden of the farming, and Mabel by the sheer loneliness of being in a perpetually cold log cabin in the middle of nowhere. It’s all very harsh, bleak and sad – if it wasn’t quite so boring.

Based on a Russian folk tale about an older childless couple who build a little girl from snow to find her come to life, Ivey’s novel essentially sticks the same story in an Alaskan setting. In a single moment of letting go, Jack and Mabel make a snow girl, dress her in mittens and a scarf, carve her a face and stain her lips with berries. The next morning there is nothing but mush to be found in its place, and a mysterious young girl in the same mittens and scarf starts to appear in the woods around their house. Its all very dramatic and sudden and oh-so-magical – until its not. They learn that the child’s name is Faina, and the details she eventually gives Jack about her background are far from mysterious. And yet – how does an ordinary child survive so successfully alone in the harsh winter? How does this child seem to cause flurries of snow to fall? Why does she seem to only flourish in the snow? Where does she go those long, lonely summers when she refuses to stay with Jack and Mabel? Where the caribou are, she tells them, choosing to leave a great deal unsaid, unexplained.

The questions surrounding Faina are painstakingly planned through the book. That’s not to say that this is a weak element of the book – it’s fairly well laid out and there are occasions when the language is almost poetic and it is always simple, the narrative never difficult to follow or understand. It’s just all a bit melodramatic. It’s clear at the very start that whatever mysterious elements exist will remain mysterious – there’s no mystery about that.

The Snow Child has a slow, monotonous start – much like the protagonists’ lifestyle. The entrance of Faina is meant to lift both them and the reader right out of the cold, sad slump everyone is in, but it doesn’t completely manage. The narrative is interesting only when it moves to Faina’s relationship with Garrett, the son of another homesteading family. With them, the book finally has characters who feel more than just one overwhelming emotion. Jack and Mabel (albeit melodramatically suffering), only seem to feel a sense of longing – for a child, for their old life, for who they used to be. Faina saves both them, and the narrative, but not nearly fast enough.

There is no doubt that this story will appeal to a certain type of reader – probably mostly to educated, white American women – and that this will ensure a great deal of publicity for the book, but along with the Alaskan winters, something in The Snow Child remains aloof and cold.