Book review: ‘The Snow Child’ by Eowyn Ivey

Eowyn Ivey’s debut novel The Snow Child, first published in 2012, is a genre-bending tale of longing, conflict and struggle, set in the majestic wilderness of Alaska. An interesting wintertime read, but probably not for everyone.

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Having lost their first and only baby, Jack and Mabel – already middle-aged – move from Pennsylvania all the way to Alaska. They start their lives from scratch, struggling to build their homestead and set up a farm near the small town of Alpine. Lonely and isolated, trying to make ends meet and filled with worries and regrets, one winter day they try to cheer themselves up by building a snowman – a snow girl, actually. The following morning, the snow girl is just a pile of snow; her red scarf and mittens gone. But there seem to be child’s footprints leading away from the pile towards the forest.

Over the coming days and weeks, both Jack and Mabel catch glimpses of an elusive, half-wild girl near their home. Eventually they manage to communicate with her and get to know her a little bit. However, they are the only ones from Alpine who have ever seen or heard of her. Could it be that their grief, combined with cabin fever, is making them hallucinate this child? Or have they somehow, as if by magic, materialized her from the snow girl they made?

The rest of this lengthy novel is a protracted play with different elements that the author weaved into this story. And that’s where its main weakness lies: there are too many elements that don’t necessarily contribute to a coherent and consistent storytelling. On the one hand, there’s the Snegoruchka storyline – the refashioning of an old Russian fairy tale, implying that the girl, Faina, is indeed the Snow Maiden, a mythical creature inhabiting those thick Alaskan woods. On the other hand, as the couple gets to know the girl, they learn about her past; together with them, readers come to a safe conclusion that she is very much a real child with a troubled history.

As the eerie suspense of the early chapters dissipates, the book moves into the romantic territory: Faina – now seen by others, as well – falls in love with a young man from the neighbourhood. And yet, the author continues to toy with the notions of fantasy, myth, legend and psychological disturbance, trying to maintain the delicate balance between them until the very end. One gets the feeling that Ivey couldn’t decide whether to write a modern fairy tale, a psycho-thriller, or a YA romance novel. So she attempted to write a three-in-one, which didn’t actually work out as planned.

Apart from this genre conundrum and a number of loose strings – parts of the plot that don’t get any meaningful resolution and that the author seems to have completely forgotten about – another thing I disliked about the book are all the unnecessarily graphic scenes of animal cruelty. They were probably meant to underscore the unforgiving cruelty of the Alaskan wilderness, but they felt totally overdone and not at all fitting the general narrative. 

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Do not judge this book by its cutesy cover. If you want a cozy and comfy book for those snowy days of winter, this one will give you plenty of snow and some of that heartwarming log cabin atmosphere. But as it turns out, it happens to be an unexpectedly unsettling novel with some serious structural flaws.

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COVER IMAGE CREDIT

Photo by Adam Chang via Unsplash