I've seen this book listed as an example of Magical Realism, and as that is a genre that really doesn't resonate with me, I think that it might miss the mark with The Snow Child. I feel alienated from the characters in books like Song of Solomon and One Hundred Years of Solitude, as though there is no way that I can identify with characters who could just fly away from their problems, literally, but since these novels are celebrated as "important works", I have read them in the same spirit as I eat spinach and turnips.
But then there's The Snow Child. Books about grieving mothers always touch me, shock me and leave me weeping, and though I have not known tragedy in my own life, there's something obviously cathartic about trying on someone else's grief, teasing at the edges of the emotions one hopes to never know intimately.
Mabel and Jack have known tragedy with their only child arriving stillborn and decide, in late middle age, to relocate to the Alaska wilderness and attempt to use their New England farming skills for frontier homesteading. When a little girl they make out of snow one night is discovered knocked over the next morning, coinciding with the appearance of a mysterious little girl flitting around the edges of the woods, they have to wonder, "Is this magic? A lost child? Cabin fever?" In the land of the Northern Lights and the Midnight Sun, the answer doesn't really matter; they relocated precisely to open themselves up to new experiences.
This story follows the conventions of a fairytale, with a familiar story arc and lessons learned along the way, but as it made me cry in empathy three different times, it nourished my soul in the way that spinach and turnips never will. Eowyn Ivey, raised in Alaska, says that she had spent a lifetime of reading trying to find stories that told of her experience, but finding none, felt like an orphan in the literature of her country. Hanging her novel on the framework of an old Russian fable, she has used beautiful language (no doubt with a genetic, if not environmental, nod to the author's mother, a poet) to describe a landscape and time, though far away on each count from this Canadian, that resonated with me fully and left me sated and satisfied by the end.
