The Snow Child

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Reviewed By Toni Whitmont, Booktopia Buzz Editor
You know you have found a really special book when reading it gives you shivers. This is especially true when you happen to be reading the book in weather conditions far more conducive to sweltering than shivering.

I took Eowyn Ivey's The Show Child on holiday with me. I read it in surroundings that could not be further removed from the book's ice-cold, Alaskan setting. And yet despite the fact that I was on a beach, and in the middle of a baking hot Australian summer, I still found myself hopelessly lost in a wintry world of frost and snow......

In The Press

Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child is an enchanting, transporting tale. It places the reader at the juncture of Russian fairy tale and hard reality in the isolated wilderness of Alaska. The novel bewitched me with its profound, uncanny knowledge of parental yearning for a real relationship with a beloved and longed for child. It's an amazing achievement. Only a story that responds to the magic of the fairy tale could touch the quick in the way this novel does. The writing of winter and of its daughter will dazzle the reader with its beauty and power. Ivey's book is also a study of the give and take of modern marriage, how it changes over time, how separateness and connection within the bond each take their turn. The Snow Child is no ordinary read; I recommend it with great enthusiasm for those who want an amazing experience.
—Sena Jeter Naslund (Ahab's Wife, most recently Adam & Eve)

With eerie simplicity and a touch of magic, Eowyn Ivey creates a homesteader's Alaska whose hardy people come to know that they are people in an old, old story. A pair of mittens, a fox pelt, the fluff of a summer cottonwood, a dress made of swan feathers, a child's coming and going, the notion that 'a watched sky never snows'—these are the makings of this moving tale about love, survival, and the passage of time. The Snow Child gives us, in imagery as crisp and glistening as a ripe winter apple, a newfangled fable for the ages. Reader, you are bound to see yourself in its chapters.
—M. Allen Cunningham (The Green Age of Asher Witherow and Lost Son)

The Snow Child is a vivid story of isolation and hope on the Alaska frontier, a narrative of struggle with the elements and the elemental conflict between one's inner demons and dreams, and the miracle of human connection and community in a spectacular, dangerous world. You will not soon forget this story of learning to accept the gifts that fate and love can bring.
—Robert Morgan (Gap Creek)

this story has the intricate fragility of a snowflake and the natural honesty of the dirt beneath your feet
If Willa Cather and Gabriel García Marquéz had collaborated on a book, The Snow Child would be it. It is a remarkable accomplishment—a combination of the most delicate, ethereal, fairytale magic and the harsh realities of homesteading in the Alaskan wilderness in 1918. Stunningly conceived, beautifully told, this story has the intricate fragility of a snowflake and the natural honesty of the dirt beneath your feet, the unnerving reality of a dream in the night. It fascinates, it touches the heart. It gallops along even as it takes time to pause at the wonder of life and the world in which we live. And it will stir you up and stay with you for a long, long time.
—Robert Goolrick, (A Reliable Wife)

The Snow Child is a treasure of northern style storytelling. Deep under the crust of snow and ice, beneath the surface of loneliness and longing, beats the passionate heart of Spring. Anyone who has known the duration of a long winter and the comfort of a good book by a warm stove will love The Snow Child.
—John Straley, former Alaska Writer Laureate (The Woman Who Married a Bear and The Big Both Ways)

The Snow Child is enchanting from beginning to end. Ivey breathes life into an old tale and makes it as fresh as the season's first snow. Simply lovely.
—Keith Donohue (The Stolen Child)

Eowyn Ivey's exquisite debut transports the reader away to a world almost out of time, into a fairytale destined to both chill and delight. Her portrayal of an untamed Alaska is so detailed you can feel the snowflakes on your own eyelashes, even as her characters' desperate quest for, and ultimate redemption by, love will warm your heart.
—Melanie Benjamin, author of Alice I Have Been and The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb

fresh as the season's first snow
Magical, yes, but The Snow Child is also satisfyingly realistic in its depiction of 1920s homestead-era Alaska and the people who settled there, including an older couple bound together by resilient love. Eowyn Ivey's poignant debut novel grabbed me from the very first pages and made me wish we had more genre-defying Alaska novels like this one. Inspired by a fairy tale, it nonetheless contains more depth and truth than so many books set in this land of extremes.
—Andromeda Romano-Lax (The Spanish Bow and the forthcoming The Discus Thrower).

This book is real magic, shot through from cover to cover with the cold, wild beauty of the Alaskan frontier. Eowyn Ivey writes with all the captivating delicacy of the snowfalls she so beautifully describes.
—Ali Shaw (The Girl With Glass Feet)

Reviewed By The Publisher
If Willa Cather and Gabriel García Marquéz had collaborated on a book, The Snow Child would be it.
—Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife

...an enchanting, transporting tale. It places the reader at the juncture of Russian fairy tale and hard reality in the isolated wilderness of Alaska. The novel bewitched me...
—Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab's Wife