Somewhere Between Magical Territory and Crazytown

What is this purported love child of unlikely literary parents? At first, it's a tale of?hard times and snow. It is 1920 in Alaska, and homesteaders Jack and Mabel have left Pennsylvania to toil in a gulag of their own making. Struggling to build a working farm in the middle of the Alaskan winter, heartbroken over a stillborn child, the couple?s spirits are low, their food stores lower, and their prospects dim.

Before the situation improves (thanks to an enormous moose?ex machina), Jack and Mabel take their troubles outside for a rare frolic. During a snowstorm, they build a little snow-girl who disappears into the night. Soon Faina, a winsome blonde child with a fox for a friend, emerges from the woods to bewitch them both. The central tension of the novel is Faina's existential status: Is she an actual child living off the land, a small ambulatory snow goon, or the product of lonely imaginations?

Interpolating a Russian fairy tale, Ivey keeps us guessing with a narrative that attempts to sustain the possibilities of both magical realism and real, unmagical realism. In a meta twist that forestalls a lot of beating around the bush, Jack and Mabel know the fairy tale (?Snegurochka?), and indeed possess an edition of Arthur Ransome's Russian folk stories. This device allows the Faina mystery to come right out into the open; Jack, Mabel, and the reader know that they are either in magical territory, crazytown, or somewhere in between.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=c1f163f3730f12dafe322e0c260f6d02

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