Book Spotlight: THE SNOW CHILD by Eowyn Ivey

These days, my brain operates with a stealth alarm.
The baby's asleep! Quick, grab a sandwich!The baby's asleep! Quick, go shower!The baby's asleep! Quick, write a blog post!
It's exhausting, sometimes. But hey, whatever works, right? So, here's crossing fingers I get to finish this post before he wakes up from his nap. While I have my stealth alarm, he has his mommy radar. If I'm nowhere near him, he cries. If I'm about to open the laptop, no matter how deep of a sleep he's enjoying, he will wake up.

*baby's crying*
*goes off to put baby back to sleep*
*sigh*

See? His built-in mommy radar never fails.

Anyway, I am still in reader heaven. The books I've been reading lately are all awesome! And here's the next spotlight for you, which incidentally, is one that a commenter from the previous post (Cristina!) mentioned to me.

Blurb and image from Goodreads:



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.

About the Author:

Eowyn LeMay Ivey was raised in Alaska and continues to live there with her husband and two daughters. She received her BA in journalism and minor in creative writing through the honors program at Western Washington University, studied creative nonfiction at the University of Alaska Anchorage graduate program, and worked for nearly 10 years as an award-winning reporter at the Frontiersman newspaper. This is her first novel.

You can visit her website at: http://www.eowynivey.com/
Follow her on Twitter: @EowynIvey

The Book: Adult/Magic Realism (I think.)

Reading this, I almost wished for snow. The atmosphere, the setting (homesteading in a rugged and isolated Alaskan wilderness), and the weaving of the Russian folklore of the snow child...I was entranced by the book's magical quality. Husband and wife, Jack and Mabel, are struggling to come to terms with the death of their child ten years prior. They come to Alaska in hopes of starting their life anew, away from family and friends. Away from anything familiar, from memories. But farming in a harsh, strange environment does not solve their problems. Or make the pain go away. Instead, the couple finds themselves drifting apart...until one day, on a childish whim, they build a snow girl together.

Reality and magic mesh together in this heartwarming tale of longing and forgiveness and love. A beautiful read. :)