The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

You did not have to understand miracles to believe in 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.

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.

For some reason I am finding it really hard to write my review for this book. I'm not really sure why - I really enjoyed it.

It was easy to read, but was written in a way that made me look for deeper meaning in what was being said.

I loved that there was a supernatural theme that surrounded Faina - she was a little girl who lived in the snowy Alaskan woods, but there was some magical force around her and the snow right through to the very last sentence.

Mabel transforms throughout the story - she starts off 'grey' and depressed, but slowly the life comes back to her and the love rekindled in her marriage. By the end of the story she is a strong woman.

Very well written and a lovely read on a cold wintery weekend.