Synopsis

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.

(via Amazon)

Review

*TRIGGER WARNINGS! – there is a previous miscarriage that is a point of trauma for the main couple, animal death does happen quite often for hunting purposes (some scenes are more detailed than others), there is a gray area in which a supposed 16–17-year-old gets pregnant with an almost 19-year-old (I personally did not have a problem with this since per the date, people got married and popped out babies much younger back then, plus you are never made perfectly aware of Faina’s true age so I was able to move past this, but I do put this here for your discretion), closed-door intimate scenes (some of which are the younger characters who were not married yet), some language.*

I can say I have never read a book quite like this before. While I did not dislike the story, there were moments where it was a bit of a struggle to get through, mainly due to the pacing. I was also finding myself confused as to what the true nature of Faina was, and I am honestly still kind of confused.

This is a multi-pov story which mainly swaps between Jack and Mabel, with a couple other POVs popping up nearing the end of the book.

This whole story is set within the early 1900’s of the Alaskan wilderness. As somebody who wishes to make it up there one day, the setting was both gorgeous and terrifying to me, since you never truly know what could be watching you from behind the trees in a place like that. The struggles of making a living out in such an isolated and treacherous landscape was well written in this book. You truly feel empathy for Jack and Mabel as they are struggling to get the land prepared for planting season while worrying about having enough food to make it through winter. These stresses lead to some tense moments in their relationship that I also thought was pretty realistic. You see their opinions and appreciation for the land increase as the years go on, as they become more confident in their abilities to make a home and life out there.

Jack and Mabel are a mid-life couple who has been unable to bare children for whatever reason. Per the miscarriage, you become aware of this sort of chasm that was created between the two of them over the years. Mabel feels immense amounts of guilt and remorse since she feels inadequate as a woman and wife, as well as responsible for the death of their child. Jack, not wanting to trigger Mabel, has seemingly avoided discussing the death after he buried their child himself. In the beginning of the book, they both feel like empty versions of themselves. Mix the past trauma with the sheer difficulties of living in this type of landscape, and the story was feeling extremely bleak for them at first. You get a good idea of why Mabel decided to leave their families behind to leave off the land in Alaska in the first place. Luckily, they do end up getting close with another neighboring family, who was pretty significant to the story and to the character development of both Mabel and Jack. By the end of the book, they felt like completely different people, now that it felt like they had life once again.

Faina is the little girl that wanders into Mabel and Jack’s lives after that night they built a snow girl in their yard. Per a childhood book Mabel loved as a child, she pretty quickly comes to the conclusion that Faina came out of the storybook as some kind of fairy tale being. I am still pretty confused about how accurate that is but there are some hints that this is the case. Being a little girl, she is incredible resourceful as she has been clearly taking care of herself within the blustering winter woods. She is incredibly good at trapping, tracking and hunting as she not only keeps herself from starving, but also makes it a point to bring these gifts back to Mabel and Jack. As she gets closer to the main characters, she begins to have dinner with them and even conversing with them. However, her visitations never remained constant, as she would follow the cold weather north, while the warmer weather took over the land. She would make reappearances once the first snow fell once again.

One of the cool writing choices the author made was how anytime any of the characters were speaking to Faina, there would be no quotation marks. This further drove the belief that Faina was in fact not real but an illusion. However, even when more and more people saw her and interacted with her, the quotation marks were always missing. The reason why this was quite confusing to me was what happens to Faina around the end of the book as she goes through something that only a real woman would be able to do. Was she real? Did she start off as an illusion but became real? I do not know.

The other characters in this book, mainly the other family that ramrods their way into the lives of Jack and Mabel, were slightly overwhelming but loveable at the same time. There were times in which they acted like a neighboring family in a small town, asking a bit too many questions or assumptions. However, their sunny and talkative nature only added some happiness back into Jack and Mabel’s lives so I ended up liking them a lot by the end of the book.

All-in-all, the magical realism felt as such, to the point where I questioned what parts were seeped in reality and what was more like wishful thinking. I do warn that there were some emotional and tense moments throughout, but if you like an interesting novel set in the dangerous Alaskan wilderness with a potential spirit girl, I recommend this book.