The Snow Child

3 1/2 stars.

A few other reviewers have expressed what I felt after finishing the book: the first half is better (more satisfying?) than the second half.

That's not to say that the second half isn't great. But the first half has almost an otherworldly feel to it, something magical about the lives of a husband and wife trying to make a home on the frontier. The descriptions of the Alaskan wilderness absolutely chilled me to the bone, both with their beauty and with the cold, harsh weather.

The sadness of this childless couple brought tears to my eyes. Their disappointment of losing their only child was expertly described to the reader, and I really felt their sadness in my heart. I wanted them to make it on this Alaskan frontier, I wanted them to have a child of their own, I wanted them to be able to write home of their happiness.

And the Snow Child - is she real? She seems magical, a fairy tale, maybe a figment of the couple's imagination.

That's the first half. The second half is quite a bit different. There are more characters, another family befriends our pioneers. The pacing of the book seemed different. Time passed more quickly in the second half, years covered, while the first half included just one long winter.

A good read overall!

For three quarters of its length The Snow Child is nearly a perfect read. The story of a girl made from snow unravels at a slow pace, necessary for the gradual unfolding that makes the novel so exquisite. Ivey skillfully interweaves the grace of the snow child with the textures of an untamed Alaskan wilderness. The story is most affective in its simple subtlety; through Ivey possesses a way with words, she lets the beauty of the story speak for itself. The story mirrors its subject. It is the sort of tale one wishes to get lost in, to dance in its mystery and to catch on one's tongue.

The last eighty pages or so of The Snow Child loses some of these qualities. It's jarring, largely unmagical, and cold, which could all potentially work if it felt like the coming of a blizzard, but it feels more like a mudslide. By no means is this part of the novel bad, it just loses so much of what made the rest of the book fabulous. I loved these characters and I felt like they really deserved a much better ending. There is so much that could have been done with such a lovely story that anything but the best is a letdown.

It is hard to drop this book from five stars because it is really good. Really good. It just didn't quite reach its full potential. When The Snow Child is at its best, however, it is really that good.