The child's name is Faina, and she brings hope and new passion to the marriage of Mabel and Jack. And as she flits back and forth between their small cabin and the depths of the snow-bound winter forest, she also lights up the lives of other inhabitants of their remote community of homesteaders some distance from Anchorage.
Mabel, for a while, holds to the theory of Faina's spontaneous origins: "frost ... and snowflake ... turned to flesh and bone." But Jack discovers otherwise, recognizing that this wild child, as it turns out, was orphaned at an early age and created a life for herself in the mountains, woods and streams of the Alaskan wilderness. An emblem of hope and vital heat and light in the cold season, Faina is also a real and practical creature despite her youth. She deploys her skills at hunting and foraging to keep herself alive and healthy, and as she grows older, she brings that same element of warmth and vitality to the cabin of Mabel and Jack.
Like Faina, the novel itself emerges lifelike and credible, with a delicate interface between fantastic story and realism that catches a reader's imagination from the beginning. Ivey describes an Alaska landscape that's harsh but wonderfully beautiful: a region made up mostly, it seems, of snow and frozen water, forests and mountains, and wild animals — some of them, like the girl, foraging year-round, others, like the bears, in hibernation through the winter season.
A chilly setting? Yes. A sad tale? This terrific novelistic debut will convince you that in some cases, a fantastic story — with tinges of sadness and a mysterious onward-pulsing life force — may be best for this, or any, season.
Read an excerpt of The Snow Child