The Snow Child

The Snow Child

By Eowyn Ivey

Jack and Mabel are struggling with their relationship and their inability to have children.  Seeking a new start, they travel north to become homesteaders on the Alaskan frontier.  

1920’s Alaska can be a brutal place.  Jack must manually clear his land for farming.  Mabel is expected to keep the home fires burning, although she wants nothing more than to get her hands dirty and share in the labour of farming.  Mabel begins to feel so isolated that she takes a stroll on the thin river ice, knowing full well the dangers. 

Then one day, a young girl appears at the edge of the forest.  Concerned for her safety, Jack and Mabel take her in and offer her food and shelter.  But the girl does not need their protection and quickly disappears.  Lovely and captivating, this girl flits in and out of the couple’s life as they fall hopelessly in love with her.

They begin to take on the role of caregivers and parents, but have no idea where she comes from.  It takes months, in fact, to even learn her name: Faina (Fah-EE-nah).

As months turn into years, Faina becomes a fixture at the homestead during the winter season.  Each year as the snow melts, Faina disappears into the mountains.  Her story is revealed slowly as both Jack and Mabel pursue her through the forest to learn more about her life. But the idea that she may be a magical creature always hovers on the periphery. This idea is reinforced by Mabel’s Russian picture book about a fairy child in the snow.

Yet neighbours Esther and George, who become close friends of Jack and Mabel, believe Faina to be the product of imagination – a kind of madness that sets in during the darkness of Alaskan winter.  But soon both families will become intricately tied to the otherworldly Faina.

Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child is magical realism at its best.  There is physical proof that Faina is a flesh and blood girl, and her life in the forest can be explained.  But how is it that she never feels the cold?  Why is she able to so easily move through the deep snow?  Magical or not, Faina’s presence unites Jack and Mabel, helping to heal their marriage.  A mesmerizing, haunting tale of joy and tragedy.  

Highly recommended!

 

The Best Kind of People

TheBest Kind of People 
by Zoe Whittall

Avalon Hills, a privileged town in Connecticut, is the picture of respectability. Their renowned prep school is a place where young people go to learn, grow, and get accepted into Ivy League colleges. George Woodbury is a highly respected teacher at this school, winning teacher of the year every year for the past 10 years after stopping an armed gunman roaming the school hall. His daughter is in the top classes at this same school, his son a respected lawyer in New York, and his wife a triage nurse awarded a medal of service by the mayor himself. These are truly the best kind of people, which is why it comes as such a shock when the police barge into their home and arrest George on charges of sexual misconduct with multiple minors. 

This book follows the lives of George’s wife Joan, his daughter Sadie, and his son Andrew as they await the trial. Joan endures endless external condemnation while also trying to process the possibility that her husband is a sexual predator, all while continuing to be a mother, wife, and trying to remain a functioning human being.  Sadie and Andrew have their own demons to face, from endless questions about their own childhoods with an alleged sexual offender, to loss of friends and respect in their community. Each perspective is unique and thought-provoking.

I found it interesting that the book started with the pinnacle of George’s heroism, when he stopped the armed gunman roaming the school halls. This really set the reader up to see George as everyone else sees him: charming, affable, and heroic. As a result, it’s all the more shocking and confusing when he is accused of these heinous crimes. Like his family members, the reader has to work through what they thought they knew of this character versus the allegations he faces.

The Best Kind of People reminded me of Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng.  They both have a similar white suburbia setting and center on an issue without a clear black and white answer. 

Moon of the Crusted Snow

Moon of the Crusted Snow

By Waubgeshig Rice

Waubgeshig Rice’s novel Moon of the Crusted Snow opens in the crisp autumn chill of a northern Ontario reserve.  Evan Whitesky, a young husband and father, prepares his home for impending winter.  Even in these times of modern conveniences, Evan uses his knowledge of hunting to feed his family and provide a reliable source of healthy food.  Many on the reserve have let their traditional knowledge wane, preferring to rely only on the grocery store.

When cell service disappears, Evan is not surprised – these things happen when you live far north of most of civilization.  When the power goes out and landline service is cut, it’s a little disconcerting but certainly not beyond imagining.  The Band Chief and council simply start up the generators which run on diesel – they’ve been doing this for decades anyway.

But as the days pass with no word from Hydro or anyone else in the south, everyone starts to wonder what’s happening.  Chief Terry, Evan and a few other key players must keep everyone on the reserve calm.

The return of two young men who were attending university in the south throws everything into disarray.  Kevin and Nick put their survival skills to the test, travelling hundreds of kilometres on snowmobiles to flee mounting chaos in the city.  The power outages and service disruptions are everywhere.

Enter Justin Scott, a mysterious snowmobiler who appears suddenly at the edge of town.  Towing a sled full of supplies, Scott has followed Kevin and Nick’s snowmobile tracks all the way to the reserve.  He presents himself as a survivalist who just wants a community to live in away from the city.  But Evan has a bad feeling about Scott.

The presence of an outsider in a small community is just a part of the slowly unfolding crisis that takes place when the sources of heat, energy, food and water that we count on suddenly disappear.  

Moon of the Crusted Snow will fill you with a sense of foreboding as the story builds to a terrifying climax.  Curl up in a blanket and hunker down with this wintry tale of suspense and survival.

The Best We Could Do

The Best We Could Do 

Thi Bui

Upon becoming a first time mother, Thi Bui reflects on the lives of her Vietnamese parents.  In an effort to understand her tense relationship with her parents, the author explores her family’s story and recreates it in this beautiful graphic memoire.  During the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, her parents made a daring escape to Malaysia to seek refuge from a country in turmoil.  How they came to be on that boat, and how they eventually came to the United States is a much longer and more complicated story that really shines a light on the enduring strength of people in the face of adversity.    

Alternating between periods in each of her parents lives, Bui weaves a story of two separate people who come together to create a family that endures through hardship and works hard to bring better times. The stories of Bui’s parents, Bo and Ma, as children, as a young couple, as new parents, and as refugees, shows amazing growth of character and really humanizes Bo and Ma beyond the label of just being Bui’s parents.  

Beyond the amazing story of two people carting their three children (while Ma is eight months pregnant!) across the seas on a rickety boat, dodging pirates and detection to save their family from the chaos of Vietnam at the end of the Vietnam War, this story exemplifies the hardships parents will endure for their children.  This love is illustrated so beautifully in word and image throughout the book.   While Bui did not grow up in a household where love was expressed verbally or openly on a daily basis, you can see that Ma and Bo did the best they could. 

The Best We Could Do reminded me of Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and Louis Riel by Chester Brown.  All three books use a different medium to convey true stories of people facing resistance from external forces.  The illustrations bring a new dimension to the telling of these stories.