Online Reading Challenge discussion

SUMMARY

In Eowyn Ivey’s magical debut novel The Snow Child, a couple creates a child out of snow. When she appears on their doorstep as a little girl, wild and secretive, their lives are changed forever.

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for a couple who have never been able to conceive. Jack and Mabel 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 catch sight of an elusive, blonde-haired girl running through the trees.

fainaThis 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 leaves blizzards in her wake. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who seems to have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in the Alaska wilderness, life and death are inextricable, and what they eventually learn about Faina changes their lives forever.

Eowyn was inspired to write the novel after she discovered the classic Russian fairy tale of the snow maiden. She was shelving books in the children’s section of Fireside Books when she happened across a copy of Freya Littledale’s retelling of the fairy tale with illustrations by Alaskan artist Barbara Lavallee. The story haunted Eowyn with its loneliness and magic in a landscape so similar to the one she grew up in. She spent the next few months researching the original tale, and depictions of it in Russian art work, before she began writing.

The Snow Child has been described as a “remarkable achievement”, “stunningly conceived” and “enchanting from beginning to end.”
(Summary provided by the author)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eowyn (pronounced A-o-win) LeMay Ivey was raised in Alaska and continues to live there with her husband and two daughters. She worked for nearly a decade as a bookseller at independent Fireside Books in Palmer, Alaska, and prior to that as a reporter for the local newspaper, The Frontiersman.

Her new novel, To the Bright Edge of the World, will be released August 2. Her debut novel, The Snow Child, was a New York Times bestseller published in more than 25 languages. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a UK National Book Award winner, an Indies Choice award for debut fiction, and a PNBA Book Award winner

Eowyn’s essays and short fiction have appeared in London’s Observer Magazine, Sunday Times Magazine, Sunday Express Magazine, Woman & Home Magazine, the anthology Cold Flashes, the North Pacific Rim literary journal Cirque, FiveChapters, and Alaska Magazine.
(Biography provided by the author)

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

• How do traditionally feminine and masculine spheres relate in this book? Do they mix or do they stay separate?

• Did you feel satisfied by Faina’s ending? Why or why not?

• What do you believe the fox represented?

• There are a couple spots in this book where Mabel definitely should have died – namely, when walking on the river at the start and when she runs into the forest after Faina and gets caught in a snow storm. What do you think this suggests about Mabel’s character, Alaska, or the wilderness in general?

• If you have never experienced pregnancy or a miscarriage, did you feel disconnected at all from Mabel and Jack in the ways pregnancy overwhelmingly shaped their lives? If you have had these experiences, did you feel you understood the characters better as a result?

• What reasoning did you feel was behind the lack of quotation marks whenever a person was engaged in conversation with Faina? Was the effect successful?

• Do you feel the book “captured” the Alaskan wilderness? In what ways did the author attempt to do so stylistically?

• Why have the “story within a story” of the fairy tale book? And why have it be in Russian, with the translation following later in the story?

• When Mabel first arrives in Alaska, it seems a bleak and lonely place to her. Does her sense of the land change over time? If so, how?

• Why are Jack and Mabel emotionally estranged from each other in the beginning of the novel, and how are they able to overcome that?

• How do Esther Benson and Mabel differ in temperament, and how does their friendship change Mabel?

• The first time Garrett sees Faina in person is when he spies her killing a wild swan. What is the significance of this scene?

• In what ways does Faina represent the Alaska wilderness?

• Jack and Mabel?s only child is stillborn. How does this affect Mabel?s relationship with Faina?

• When Jack is injured, Esther and Garret move to their farm to help them. How does this alter Jack and Mabel?s relationship?

• Much of Jack and Mabel?s sorrow comes from not having a family of their own, and yet they leave their extended family behind to move to Alaska. By the end of the novel, has their sense of family changed? Who would they consider a part of their family?

• Death comes in many forms in The Snow Child, including Mabel giving birth to a stillborn infant, Jack shooting a moose, Faina slaying a swan, the fox killing a wild bird, Jack and Mabel slaughtering their chickens, and Garrett shooting the fox. Why is this one of the themes of the book and what is the author trying to say about death?

• What do you believe happened to Faina in the end? Who was she?
(Discussion questions provided by World’s Smallest Book Club and LitLovers)