The Snow Child: A Novel [J0087]

2012 -PB Nice clean condition. In this magical debut - and Pulitzer Prize finalist - a couple's lives are changed forever by the arrival of a little girl, wild and secretive, on their snowy doorstep. Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "A book about love (in all its forms) & wilderness told with one of my favorite pens, Eowyn Ivey's. it's so understated, so vivid, so beautiful, so tender."; "Gorgeous book. This is a rich, atmospheric story about the strength of familial love and how it transcends blood relation. It emphasizes the importance of understanding and accommodating difference of customs, as well as learning to let go."; "What a story!! This book is magical. I could not put it down. I fell deeply in love with every character and hated to see it end. This is a book that I will be thinking of for a very long time!"