The Snow Child

When a childless couple build a snow girl with cranberry-red lips and yellow straw for hair, they hardly expect her to come alive, but that seems to be what magically occurs in The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey.

Jack and Mabel have come to Alaska in 1920 to homestead a farm. They have come to escape the sorrow of their stillborn child, and with dreams of starting over in the pristine wilderness, but they never expected the harsh reality of the immense physical struggles they would face. During the first snowstorm of winter, they put aside their worries and build a snow girl, giving her a beautiful face and hair, a red wool scarf for her neck and matching mittens for her tree-branch hands. The next morning she is gone, but so are the scarf and mittens. Soon they start seeing a little girl with yellow hair and red scarf flitting noiselessly through the trees, and their lives are changed forever.

Based on a traditional Russian fairy tale, The Snow Child is an extraordinary tale of magic meeting reality, at once enchanted and brutally honest. I loved it. (By the way, it was a 2013 Pulitzer Prize finalist.)

TBC