The Snow Child

A childless couple, Jack and Mabel, seek solace from the traumas of a miscarriage by starting a new life in the Alaskan wilderness. When the much anticipated first snow comes they build a snow girl in their first really joyful encounter with the harsh Alaskan landscape. The next day the snow girl has disappeared, in her place a dead rabbit. When Jack glimpses a girl running through the woods and child sized tracks, their world changes irrevocably, mimicking the storyline of a Russian fairytale from Mabel's childhood.  

Snow pervades the pages of this heartbreakingly beautiful story. In seeking to escape happy families back home - a reminder of their failed attempts at a family - Jack and Mabel find they are confronted with unbearable buried grief for their lost child and the overwhelming task of survival in their new stark Alaskan existence. When the snow child skips into their lives, they are able to slowly find peace with the past and with their new homestead life and to live out the maternal and paternal dreams they have harboured all these years, rekindling their love in the process. The tough existence of frontier life is detailed without sentiment by Ivey, but with a bracing beauty in the tradition of the Russian fairytale it references.