"All her life she had believed in something more, in the mystery that shape-shifted at the edge of her senses. It was the flutter of moth wings on glass and the promise of river nymphs in the dappled creek beds. It was the smell of oak trees on the summer evening she fell in love, and the way dawn threw itself across the cow pond and turned the water to light."
Eowyn Ivey's surreal "Snow Child" transports you to the early-20th-century Alaskan frontier, where everything glows with danger and possibility.
"You did not have to understand miracles to believe them, and in fact Mabel had come to suspect the opposite. To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as you were able before it slipped like water between your fingers."
"Snow Child" blends sparse punctuation with clipped, easy prose, building an otherworldly quality that lends a touch of haunting to a fairy tale.
A 6-year time jump and an ambiguous ending create potential obstacles for some readers, but the overall effect immerses you in an environment where emotions are laid raw, realities cannot be ignored, and mortality is challenged daily.
"Here with the child in the trees, all things seemed possible and true."
Ivey's quick read burns with intensity and foreboding, yet ties you inexorably to the vividly realized characters. "Show Child" represents absorbing escapism in an epoch that screams out loud for it.
"In my old age, I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees."
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