A Study Guide for Eowyn Ivey's "The Snow Child"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Eowyn Ivey's "The Snow Child", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: May 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781410393326

Book preview

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The Snow Child

Eowyn Ivey

2012

Introduction

The Snow Child is Eowyn Ivey's debut novel and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for 2013. Setting the novel in Alaska in the 1920s, Ivey draws on her own experiences as an Alaskan to portray the wilderness as both cruel and beautiful. It is in this complex setting that an older, childless couple rediscover happiness and each other when a beautiful, mysterious, and independent little girl named Faina enters their lives. The author uses elements of magic realism to reimagine the Russian folk tale Snegurochka that inspired the novel.

The Snow Child develops the themes of isolation, family, love, social expectations, beauty, and loss. An omniscient narrator shifts between different points of view to explore the characters' feelings and show the complexities of their relationships. Faina's thoughts, however, are never revealed, leaving her a constant mystery to readers, who must draw their own conclusions about the character and her fate.

Author Biography

Ivey was born Eowyn LeMay on February 2, 1973, in Denver, Colorado. Her mother named her after a character from The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien, according to an interview with Tim Masters for the BBC. Her mother, Julie Hungiville LeMay, is a poet who raised her daughter to love literature. Ivey's family moved to Alaska when she was a young child, and she grew up surrounded by the beauty and harsh reality of nature. After graduating from high school, Ivey attended Western Washington University, where she earned a degree in journalism in 1995. She also studied creative nonfiction at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.

Ivey returned to Palmer, Alaska, where she worked as a reporter and assistant editor for the local paper, Frontiersman. She also contributed to the anthology Cold Flashes, as well as the periodicals Sunday Times Magazine, Sunday Express Magazine, and the Observer (London, England). Ivey left journalism to become a bookseller in 2004. It was while working at Fireside Books that she discovered the folktale that would inspire The Snow Child, according to an interview with Charlotte Williams in Bookseller. The New York Times best seller was published in 2012 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Ivey earned the UK National Book Award for International Author of the Year.

Her second novel, The Bright Edge of the World, was released in 2016. Like The Snow Child, the novel is set in the Alaskan