Tattered Cover's First 2012 VIB: The Snow Child

 

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.

Lisa C says:
"The Snow Child is set at the turn of the century when people were homesteading in Alaska - we meet Mabel and Jack, a middle-aged, childless, couple doing their best to farm the land and survive the winters. Everything looks as bleak as the white snow, when she appears, this child, or sprite, or snow maiden, ethereal,  feral and wild. Is this the child they hoped to have; is it a miracle; is it magic? Ivey weaves a beautiful tale about average people who are involved in something extraordinary. Her use of language makes the setting as important as the characters. As stark as the Alaskan wilderness can be in winter, part of the time I was reading it, I felt like I was running the snow-covered hills along with the characters. It was as if I could have reached out and touched them, yet they was just out of grasp, like the girl. This is a book I will re-read, and it will be a stunning book club choice."

Jackie says:
"This is a tale of loneliness and magic, of a mystical reality that veils a more bleak one and answers a dream only halfway.  What can you do when the only way to have your fondest wish is to lose it time and time again?  This tale of an older couple in 1920s Alaska is filled with profound emotion and delicate storytelling. It weaves its own magic around the reader, drawing you in until you can feel and smell the glittering snow, hear the logs in the stove crackling, and perhaps see a glimpse of a blue coat, a flash of white-blonde hair, or the tail of a fox disappearing behind a tree just across the yard.  This is a very strong start for a debut novelist--I'll be keeping my eye on her to see what she conjures up next."

Every now and then we encounter a new book that we’re so excited about we want to shout it from the rooftops, so we've created a special tag to distinguish it from the rest: TC V.I.B. (very impressive book)! That means it’s a true stand-out in a season of many excellent and compelling new books.