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 goodreads.com)
I give this book 5 out of 5 stars.
I absolutely LOVED this book. There is no part of it that I can say anything negative about. The plot was complicated yet simple and it reached out and grabbed ahold of me from the first page. I have always adored fairy tales (in fact, my college honors thesis was based on fairy tales and urban legends) and that is what initially drew me to this book. Eowyn Ivey does a marvelous job painting a world where the lines between reality and fantasy are so blurred that you often find yourself wondering if a fantastical element could be possible in reality. The characters are also very well thought out. They are each strong yet vulnerable, sympathetic yet aggravating, and very true-to-life.
The story takes place in the wilderness of Alaska in the 1920s. A middle-aged couple seeks adventure and independence on a farm in the middle of nowhere. The town is so small it doesn't even have a doctor. That first year is rough for the couple and things start to look very bleak. Then, the couple makes a snow child (a child-sized version of a snowman) and voila! The author begins to weave the classic fairy tale into her plot. Without even realizing it, you find youself hoping that the snow child is a real child that the couple can care for and keep safe. She comes and goes as she pleases and her innocent facade holds many secrets that the reader can't wait to have revealed.
My favorite thing about it is that the author meanders through time at her own pace. Sometimes she spends several pages focused on the span of single day, then she'll skip over an entire year in a sentence. She shows the characters growing older and wiser. She shows the goodness in each person that we all secretly wish for in our own reality. She reveals that bad decisions don't define a person. It is possible to betray someone in the heat of the moment then regret it and make amends through a heartfelt act. It is possible to hurt someone over and over again and still have them look at you with love in their eyes. It is possible to love someone and let them go without knowing when, or even if, they will return to you.
How subtle is it to fall in love? When does a child become a woman or a man? Is it when they kill their first hunt? Is it when they share a first kiss? Is it when they risk their own physical health to be near the person they love?
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