The Snow Child: Is She Real?

            In the novel, The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey, the story is told of and older couple, Mable and Jack, who move to a homestead in Alaska to seek a new life of adventure after they are unable to have a baby...but it is not what they get. They are bored with their lives, with each other, and with the humdrum routine of their everyday life. One night, on the first snow of winter, they build a snow girl, and no ordinary one. Every detail is sculpted with delicate preciseness, from the curve of her cheeks to the scarf and mittens that kept her warm. The next morning, she is gone, nothing but crushed snow remaining, but a little girl from the woods has taken her place. They thought their prayers had been answered, a little girl lost and in need of protection that they can call their own. She wore the same clothes that had disappeared from the snow child. This event causes the reader to want to know more about the child, who we later learn is named Faina. Questions plague our minds: Is she real? Is she just a hallucination? A lost dream that they can never have? Is it magic that conjured her up from just the ordinary snow? No one else aside from the couple had ever seen her, and it would stay that way for many years, until she finally meets some of their neighbor friends. She eventually adjusts to the normal life of the homesteaders but still has mysterious tendencies. She disappears at night into the woods, survives perfectly well on her own, and must remain cool at all times or else she begins to fever. These traits makes us contemplate whether her existence was real of conjured up by Jack and Mable's misery. One thing remains clear throughout the entire novel, though: to Jack and Mable, she was always real.