Only the tragically misinformed would ever sigh over the night’s first star and wish for a real fairy-tale ending. Long before Julia Roberts made prostitution look so romantic and Disney sauteed the Little Mermaid in marshmallow fluff, fairy tales were full of unsettling transformations and traumatic bargains. Those authentic stories scratch anxieties and longings deep within us. Children, of course, know this, even as they’re gently redirected into the sanitized happily ever after.
Fortunately, there are still fine writers willing to venture into the dark forest of fairy tales, from A.S. Byatt and Margaret Atwood to Aimee Bender and Neil Gaiman. (My, what big sales you have!) But it’s a difficult act of wizardry: One wrong spell and you’re cast out of the kingdom of literary fiction or, worse, left suspended between YA and adult fiction, too hot for one group, too cold for the other.
(Reagan Arthur Books) - "The Snow Child: A Novel" by Eowyn Ivey
How delightful then to find this lovely first novel inspired by a Russian folk tale. You may remember “The Little Daughter of the Snow” from Arthur Ransome’s “Old Peter’s Russian Tales.” A childless couple forms a girl from snow and, in answer to their longing, she comes to life. That’s essentially what happens in Eowyn Ivey’s “The Snow Child,” but the author has transported the story to her native Alaska and fleshed it out with an endearing set of characters.
Elements of this story make sentimentality as tempting as a witch’s gingerbread house, but Ivey never strays far from the original’s underlying sadness. The novel opens with a scene of chilly silence: It’s 1920, and Mabel and Jack have fled the civilized world of Pennsylvania to homestead 160 acres in Alaska Territory. Mabel “had imagined the two of them working in green fields framed by mountains as tall and snowy as the Swiss Alps,” but after two years, the isolation and darkness are too much. Mabel has “withered and shrunk in on herself.” Afraid to use a gun, she ventures out onto the lake to drown, but the ice thwarts even that plan and she treads home to spend another day with her husband, “each of them fading away without the other’s notice.”
But the bleakness of their farm isn’t the only thing weighing them down. As we learn in the opening pages, Mabel had hoped that at the edge of the continent she would never have to see or hear another child, another reminder of the stillborn infant who was their last chance for happiness. In Ivey’s clear, simple voice, neither bathetic nor overwrought, Mabel and Jack’s yearning for a child feels as palpable as frost. The grief of miscarriage spreads out over this landscape in all its blank-white pain.
That desolate opening, though, gives way to an irresistibly happy scene when these two people forget their sorrow for one night and begin horsing around outside, acting like the children they miss so much. Jack makes a little snowman. On a whim, they dress it up with yellow grass and a scarf.
The real magic of this story is that it’s never as simple as it seems, never moves exactly in the direction you think it must. (Beware what you read or hear about “The Snow Child.” The plot is a fragile crystal of suspense that will easily melt in the hands of enthusiastic fans.) Who is the little girl that Jack spots running through the snowy woods, moving “like a rainbow trout in a stream”? Can it be the snow child that Mabel remembers from the fairy-tale book of her youth? “What she was seeing could not be,” Ivey writes, “and yet it did not waver.”
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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