Book World: Eowyn Ivey’s ‘The Snow Child’ gives fairy tale new life

Whether she really exists or not, Faina, as they eventually call her, will capture your imagination just as she captures Jack and Mabel’s. With “grey-green lichens, wild yellow grasses, and curled bits of birch bark” in her hair, she scampers among the trees with her fox, appearing and disappearing without warning. She’s another in the growing crowd of fiercely independent girls we’ve seen in recent fiction including Karen Russell’s “Swamplandia!,”Bonnie Jo Campbell’s “Once Upon a River” and Jesmyn Ward’s “Salvage the Bones.” At first, Faina is “a phantom, a silent blur,” “fanciful and yet feral.” And she grows no less mysterious and magnetic when we get to see more of her. She hovers between reality and fantasy just as this novel does.  

Although Ivey teases us with surreal elements, they remain an elusive scent in these pages, which are grounded in the deadly but gorgeous Alaskan landscape. And there’s nothing make-believe about the tender solicitude between Jack and his wife of 20 years. He sees the transformation in her when she believes “the child was born to them of ice and snow and longing,” but he’s wary of her magical thinking, terrified that she won’t survive another loss. “Her capacity for grief frightened him,” Ivey writes, and her fear haunts even the happiest scenes in this novel, which is a captivating mix of melancholy and whimsy. (The fairy-tale instinct must run deep in the author’s blood: The name Eowyn comes from Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.”)

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(Reagan Arthur Books) - "The Snow Child: A Novel" by Eowyn Ivey

As much as I loved falling under the spell of “The Snow Child,” in colder moments I became aware that it’s too long. The plot isn’t really complex enough and Ivey’s style isn’t rich enough to support 400 pages. Nine years as a journalist for the Frontiersman have helped her develop an honest, transparent voice and a bracing knowledge of this raw terrain. But a more aggressive editor could have invisibly pruned away at least a quarter of this to let the story move as agilely as Faina darts through the woods.

That said, when I was wiping my eyes at the end — must have been snow blowing in my face — I felt sorry to see these kind people go. Sad as the story often is, with its haunting fairy-tale ending, what I remember best are the scenes of unabashed joy. That isn’t a feeling literary fiction seems to have much use for, but Ivey conveys surprising moments of happiness with such heartfelt conviction. Mabel’s sister puts it well in a letter from Pennsylvania: “In my old age, I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.”

You’ll catch that same magic in the leaves of this book.

Charles is The Post’s fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter: @RonCharles.

THE SNOW CHILD

By Eowyn Ivey

Little, Brown. 389 pp. $24.99