The Snow Child - Eowyn Ivey - Author Guest Post! - Blog Tour

As part of the Blog Tour for the publication of the paperback edition of The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey, I am delighted to feature a guest post by the author here today!

Eowyn Ivey

By Eowyn Ivey, author of The Snow Child

One of my earliest recollections is of my parents telling me we were moving to Alaska. I was only 3 or 4 years old, and Alaska conjured images of ferocious black bears and wild strawberries.  Perhaps because it was summertime when we left Colorado, I didn’t imagine the snow and ice and darkness I would eventually encounter. I packed my baseball and mitt, my teddy bear and a stack of books.

From then on, my entire memory life inhabits Alaska.  I grew up in a place of mountains and spruce forests, snowstorms, frozen lakes, salmon streams, and the aurora borealis. I was fed on moose meat and homegrown potatoes. Family vacations were caribou hunting trips on the tundra, and I spent much of my childhood without running water or television. Slowly, as I visited grandparents on the East Coast, vacationed in Florida, traveled to England as a teenager, and attended college in Washington State, I began to understand that Alaska is not like the rest of the world. 

I was drawn to write The Snow Child in part because it was a path to explore my own relationship with Alaska. It is not an easy place to live. Some people come here and detest its extremes, its isolation and wilderness. It has been so much a part of who I am for so long, I wondered what it would be like to see it for the first time as an adult.  What would an Alaskan winter feel like if I had never before experienced it? How would it feel to walk through the forest if I hadn’t spent my childhood playing there?

And so I followed my characters Jack and Mabel north and watched them struggle with the elements and loneliness and fear and waited to see if they would come to love it as I do.

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About the novel (synopsis from the publisher):

A magical novel with a distinctly grown-up sensibility, THE SNOW CHILD will appeal to fans of imaginative reading group fiction, such as THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE, THE LOVELY BONES and THE BOOK THIEF

A bewitching tale of heartbreak and hope set in 1920s Alaska, The Snow Child was a bestseller on hardback publication, and went on to establish itself as one of the key literary debuts of 2012.

Alaska, the 1920s.  Jack and Mabel have staked everything on a fresh start in a remote homestead, but the wilderness is a stark place, and Mabel is haunted by the baby she lost many years before.  When a little girl appears mysteriously on their land, each is filled with wonder, but also foreboding: is she what she seems, and can they find room in their hearts for her?

Written with the clarity and vividness of the Russian fairy tale from which it takes its inspiration, The Snow Child is an instant classic.

Published by Headline

Paperback edition published 30th August 2012

You can read my review of The Snow Child here.

About the author:

Named after a character from J.R.R. Tolkien`s The Lord of the Rings, Eowyn Ivey currently works at an independent bookstore in Palmer, Alaska. Before that, she was a reporter and editor for theFrontiersman newspaper.  Eowyn lives in Alaska with her husband and two daughters. The Snow Child is her debut novel.

You can visit the author's website here and follow her on twitter @EowynIvey

The Snow Child - Eowyn Ivey

‘It was fantastical and impossible, but Mabel knew it was true.’

A beautifully written, magical novel with its origins in a Russian fairy tale. In it we meet Jack and Mabel, an older couple who moved to the Alaskan wilderness to make a new life, after tragically losing their unborn child. It’s a harsh, unforgiving landscape, and life is incredibly tough for them. At first it seems a million miles from the life they had imagined for themselves there. Then, one night as the snow falls, Mabel and Jack decide to build a snowman, a snow child, a little girl which they adorn with mittens and scarf, and Jack carefully carves facial features. The next morning the figure has gone, and they being to glimpse movement in the woods. What, or who, could it be? A little girl appears from amongst the trees, and steps into their lives.

The bitterly cold, isolating environment of the homestead is superbly conveyed. We can imagine what drives Mabel to feel the way she does about the place as the book begins; the darkness and loneliness have begun to penetrate her thoughts so deeply.  Equally we can envisage how hard it is for Jack to try and build up the farm they had hoped for there. But alongside this despair and hardship, there is hope. In the form of the feral little girl who emerges from the woods after the snow child has gone. Beyond this, there is new-found friendship for Jack and Mabel with the Benson family; mother Esther is a particularly endearing character with her forthright manner and kindness to Mabel. Through the child, and their new friends, and over a number of years, Jack and Mabel gradually develop a growing love of their new environment. The author depicts the landscape and the inhabitants so vividly; the reader gets a keen sense of the cold, bitter weather and the harshness of the days lived out there in that wild place, and we come to understand how Mabel and Jack have to adapt if they are to survive, how they must become accustomed to hunting for their food.

The love that the couple have for the little girl is strong and binding, but she is used to her wild ways, hunting in the woods with a fox for company, living her life outdoors; can the dreams of all three of them ever marry together? The fragile ethereal nature of her presence is the magical heart of this captivating book.

Published in the UK by Headline Review on 1st February 2012.

Reviewed for Amazon Vine UK