Well a friend of mine is a big big big Sarah Rees Brennan fan (and was actually going to play Holly in our fan-trailer for Unspoken but she got called in for a last minute rehearsal ; ;) and I lent her Team Human. When she’d finished she asked if I wanted to read anything of hers and I said I didn’t know what she had but maybe it’d be fun to send a mystery book back and forth. So she sent me The Snow Child, which was interesting as I’d just bought it the day before. Thus is how I came to read The Snow Child.
Now I wasn’t actually going to write this review, not because the book was bad, but because I didn’t think it would be of interest as the following I have is mostly YA readers right? But recently I’ve been seeing rants and posts that have generalised YA literature, it’s readers and it’s writers in an often disparaging light. As a result I’m left wondering if there’s something juvenile about my mind that I don’t seem to enjoy anything outside of YA and I’m twenty two. Maybe it is so, or maybe I’ve just been reading YA too long that reading normal fiction where far less happens is just…dull.
So The Snow Child is based around a fairy tale of the same name where and old couple build a child out of the snow and she comes to life. But as she learns to love and becomes human she melts. Or something. I forget the particulars. Now what is interesting is that the fairy tale is featured in the book, in the form of a Russian picture book that lead character Mabel’s father showed her when she was young.
The story centers around Mabel and Jack. Having not really got over the death of their first child, and I think Mabel couldn’t have more, Mabel had suggested they move to Alaska. So they moved out to Alaska and built themselves a struggling homestead in the middle of nowhere. They’ve fallen out of love with each other as they both try to deal with their grief and time is marching on despite them. One day, something changes and as Jack is coming back from a hard day of working the land under the snow to prepare for planting Mabel attacks him with a snow ball. The two play in the snow ‘like when they were young’ and build a small snow man (snow girl) where Jack details the face and Mabel adds a red scarf and mittens.
The next day the snow man is gone, but no signs of the mittens or scarf and only one set of tracks, and not animal tracks, leading away from where the snow girl stood. Following the tracks Jack sees her flitting through the trees with pale pale blonde hair and wearing the red scarf and mittens but she doesn’t come to him. Eventually he coaxes her out with a doll and eventually she comes to the house. She brings wild presents but never stays.
The Snow Child, Fiana as she calls herself, acts as a catalyst for Mabel and Jack to re-discover each other and re-discover love. But she must leave with the Snow. While she was with them she took Jack high into the moutains and showed him the frozen body of her father and the small cave in which she lived. He slaved for days to dig a grave in the frozen earth and when Fiana left with the Snow he went again to that cave to find her. Jack despaired but Mabel, comforted by The Snow Maiden fairy tale, patiently waited. Making a coat for the child and decorating it with embroidered snowflakes from sketches Mabel had made with Fiana. Jack thought she’d gone mad.
Jack and Mabel aren’t alone though, as Jack is struggling to ready the land on his own they get help from the family from another homestead. A husband and wife, Esther, and three sons. Esther decides she and Mabel will be friends and that’s that. Slowly the closed off Mabel opens up, not just to Fiana, but to Esther also and finds herself in the snow and the dirt when Jack is laid up ill and Mabel works the land in his stead with Esther and Esther’s youngest son and trapper Garret.
Esther goes home but Garret stays on to help. There’s a six year time skip in which Mabel and Jack have truly established themselves at the homestead but time is taking it’s toll. In all this time no one but they have seen Fiana. In the story of the Snow Maiden she is described as having a fox familiar; Fiana too had a fox and Jack had forbidden Garret from trapping red foxes in response to Mabel’s fear that should Fiana’s fox be killed she’d leave like the Snow Maiden. However, in it’s age, the fox’s fur had faded and Garret shot it.
His guilt silenced him until one day, while hunting wolverine, he came across Fiana killing a swan. From then he was obsessed with her though he didn’t know it and two fall in love and kiss and make love in the snow. Jack discovers them one day and storms back to the homestead. When Garret returns Jack punches him in the face. But Mabel discovers Fiana is pregnant. Garret asks Jack’s permission to marry Fiana and, not all together willingly at first, Jack grants it. Jack and Mabel also bequeath the homestead and the farm to Garret because they have no children of their own, save Fiana as Jack describes it ‘fatherhood had crept up on him’, and for all the help he’s given them over the years.
Jack and Garret build a new log cabin to be Garret and Fiana’s family home but it’s not finished in time for the wedding. It had no roof. Fiana marries Garret in a dress made for her by Mabel and, as a surprise to all, decorated with swan feathers from, as Garret remarks, the swan she killed that day they met. Fiana delivers the baby but dies from a blood infection. She lay in bed getting hotter and hotter until eventually they took her outside and Mabel fell asleep watching her. When Mabel woke up the covers and Fiana’s bed clothes were in the snow and Mabel herself was partially burried.
While everyone else, especially Garret, spread out calling Fiana’s name, Mabel knew that she was gone. There is an epilogue set a few years later with Mabel and Jack realising their age, Garret still not entirely happy and the baby boy running around.
If you were going to study this book you could get really in depth about the how the language was used as a powerful tool to not only depict the landscape but made you feel like you were there. You could take about how Mabel and Jack were so completely inept, they dove in at the deep end but never gave up. That they went into the wilderness broken and somehow in the harsh and rough cut edge of nowhere found something warm and loving that brought them back together and that gave them back themselves.
But for me, who is used to a lot more action and side plots and secondary characters. To have such a bluntly single tracked heap of 300 odd pages where nothing really happened wasn’t exactly gripping reading. It’s Mabel and Jack being miserable. Jack killing things and planting things. Mabel cooking dinner, sewing and planting things. Then suddenly you view point shifts from Mabel for the last quarter of the book to barrel towards a hurried ending.
By mentioning the fairy tale on which this story is based within the book and having a character be aware of it, I thought there was going to be some twist to it. But Fiana, though she shows Jack her dead father, is implied to have come from the snow girl that Jack and Mabel build. When you’re used to YA fantasy novels that build up whole magical worlds and explain things like that, to have a work of fiction come from two sides and explain neither was confusing and fulfilling.
I wouldn’t even call it light reading because it’s neither funny nor gripping, you can’t jump in at any page and just go and enjoy it and find yourself amidst the action. If you’re lucky you’ll be in time for dinner.
If you just focus on Mabel and her growth as a character you could call this book a great study of an older woman whose gone through the hell of losing a child and come out fighting with some persuasion. But I wouldn’t say this book is promoting the idea that women can only be happy if they have a child as I’ve seen some reviews imply. We’re not looking at a woman who’s married, settled and looking to start a family and dragging petulant feet because she doesn’t have one. We’re looking at a berrieved young twenty-something that has carried and lost. Who has fled the pressure of surrounding family and society to the brink and there in found an answer.
You could take from this story that it doesn’t matter how bad the world outside looks, or how bad things get, or how low you find yourself. Somewhere, somehow, there will be a way out. It may happen in an instant, it make take forever. You might see it at once or you may not even realise until you’re out of danger and look back to see how far you’ve come. But it will happen.
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