‘The Snow Child’ by Eowyn Ivey

Along with the likes of Tigers in Red Weather by Liza Klaussmann, for example, Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child is one of a number of debut novels which set the publishing world alight in 2012. Though frankly this book would have been a huge success in any year, so timeless are both the tale and its telling. Set in 1920s Alaska, The Snow Child is the story of a childless couple, Jack and Mabel, who have moved all the way from Pennsylvania in search of a new life in a remote homestead. One day they decide to build their own child out of snow, only for the child to come to life and start to thrive in the frozen wilderness. The snow child becomes an eerily beautiful young girl named Faina (a local word meaning alpenglow, according to page 257) who drifts in and out of their lives, disappearing in the summer and returning again with the first snowfall, in the winter. When Faina first appears she is a very young girl, all flaxen hair and icy features, but over time she grows into a striking young woman who falls in love with Garrett, the couple’s rugged young neighbour. In spite of its snowy setting and fairy tale leanings, however, The Snow Child is no slush-fest. The book’s ending was not at all what I expected it to be, yet there is no denying its power, particularly regarding Mabel.

I mention Jack and Mabel being childless because the notion of childlessness is of great importance to The Snow Child. In fact, Ivey makes a point of opening the novel with an oblique reference to the couple’s lack of children: ‘Mabel had known there would be silence. That was the point, after all. No infants cooing or wailing. No neighbor children playfully hollering down the lane. No pad of small feet on wooden stairs worn smooth by generations, or clackety-clack of toys along the kitchen floor. All those sounds of her failure and regret would be left behind, and in their place there would be silence.’ And this is just one of several similarly heartbreaking passages that have to do with Mabel’s yearning for a child, and her grief at losing her first. After all, it is Jack and Mabel’s desire to have a child of their own which leads them into the back yard to build the snow child in the first place. And in the summer, when Faina disappears with the thaw, Mabel in particular feels the stab of old loss made new. The Snow Child captures the sadness and frustration faced by a childless couple perfectly, and yet it does so without being too sentimental.

This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in January 2013.