The Snow Child

[cornerofmadness]

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


CW -infertility, suicidal ideation, miscarriages. Plenty of on page animal death for food and fur harvesting.

So if I'm honest I would never have picked up or finished this book if not for a reading challenge prompt of infertility. It's not that this is a bad book. It's not. It's just not a me book, even with the folk lore hook (It's inspired by the snow maiden tale).

Jack and Mabel have come to homestead in Alaska in the 1920s which is an unforgiving task and they're poised to die trying. Mabel doesn't care. She wants to die, is actively seeking it in the opening chapter. They have come here to farm (and really who told anyone you could farm in Alaska?) mostly because Mabel is having severe depression over her infertility and feels people are constantly talking about her/judging her for it. She had one baby born early, born deformed, born sleeping.

Jack and Mabel both are constantly being referred to as old so how long was she suffering back in PA with this suicidal ideation and feelings of failure? Was this a late in life last chance baby she lost? We have (and will never have) no idea but regardless, they're in Alaska, barely surviving.

They would not have except for one family whose wife befriends Mabel and her sons help Jack. (and I liked that family better. They were far more interesting for as little as they were on the page in the first two of four books). One snowy day Mabel and Jack build a snow girl and give her gloves and other little details.

The next day they start seeing a little girl with a fox running around too feral to come close. Naturally both Jack and Mabel want to help this little girl who would otherwise freeze to death right? Only the little girl seems better suited for survival than they do. Eventually she comes to their home.

Her name is Faina and you'll spend the rest of the book wondering is she real or is she made of the snow and magic. Like for years. It'll go on and on for about a decade and feels like it too. For me this dragged a lot. It got repetitive. I got a little bored and started skimming.

And there are things that made no sense to me. No, not the is she a fairy folk from Russian lore. I'm happy enough to accept that she is. It was more mundane stuff like under the guidance from the mountain man family, Jack brings down a moose. Most moose weight over a thousand pounds. It's even mentioned in the story while they're dressing it out (very gory for those sensitive to those things) and the boy (who wants nothing more than to be a mountain man/fur trader) even says this will feed you all winter. Fast forward to Jack killing all of Mabel's chickens, refusing to let one alive so they don't starve. Why? There is no way they burned through hundreds of pounds of meat in a few months. I suspect it was to align Faina's story with the snow maiden story in Mabel's book but it felt dumb (and unnecessarily cruel to Mabel).

If you know the legend, you have some idea how this story will end. Like I said, this isn't a bad book (just a lot of animals die which will upset many readers) but it's not a book for me.



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