The Snow Child by 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.

• Genre:Historical fiction, Magical realism, Fairy Tales, Mystery
• Age: adult
• Source: owned paperback and ebook
• Read from March 15 to 31, 2013

FINAL RATING: ★★★★/★★★★★

“We never know what is going to happen, do we? Life is always throwing us this way and that. That’s where the adventure is. Not knowing where you’ll end up or how you’ll fare. It’s all a mystery, and when we say any different, we’re just lying to ourselves. Tell me, when have you felt most alive?”

I liked this book. It is nice, lovely, but it has only two flaws. It has reaaaaaaally long intro into the story and the pacing is slow. I didn't mind it though because in the end...it was really nice story...And, even though i thout it was going to be a tearjerker, it actually wasn't. I read it without expressing any emotions...i did not laugh and did not cry while read it. But that doesn't mean that i didn't think the story was nice. This story shows how some wishes can come true, even when they are impossible to reach...It shows how sometimes your dreams can come true in the forms you didn't expect.

It's a story about love... 
about family... 
about the ties that connect us... 
about friends and support and about a.... 
a little girl and the snowman(snow child)...
about a red fox... 
and about the couple...

The story is set in 1920-ties on winter seasons in Alaska. The plot was not strictly set in one year, but in many. In that time, it was hard to live, it was hard to survive winter seasons without hunting and farming... And the one important thing in that time was to have connections and friends. Jack and Mabel have no one when they arrive to Alaska. They have families, but they needed time alone... They wished to have a child - and they did, but their child was born dead and ever since they have been drifting apart from each other. Then, they meet their neighbors Bensons and start feeling alive again... But, then one fateful night...they made a snow girl...and she disappeared, melted, and everything they put on her was gone... and only little human footprints were left.

CHARACTERS:

“In my old age, I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.”

Now the struggle of Jack and Mabel was sometimes really difficult to read: Jack - who is afraid of admitting to people that there is a girl - and that they created her out of snow girl, but he still believes it; and Mabel who is certain they created her and that now she is real, lost in the woods and alone.

Faina is the girl - snow girl...She is clouded in mystery, and even as a reader you can not see if she is a real girl... or if she is just a fairy tale... She is wild, she is scared, but she loves Mabel and Jack...

Another character who appears and influences the story a lot is young Garrett , son of Benson family, a youngest one, who is cast in the shadow of his older brothers...He loves hunting and later he helps Jack and Mabel.

OVERALL:

Lovely book, likeable, but only if you can stand long intros in the story and have patience with slow pacing. But overall, pretty, interesting and nice story...

“We are allowed to do that, are we not Mabel? To invent our own endings and choose joy over sorrow?”

MY REVIEW ON GOODREADS