Coveted Cover: The Snow Child

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

I need this book in my life. Based around a Russian fairy-tale that I am very familiar with, The Snow Child promises to be a heart-wrenching novel. Plus it's so pretty! The alternative covers are equally gorgeous too. I particularly like these ones:

Although I think the first is my favourite out of them all. Also, I apparently have a thing about stories set in snowy places (this one being set in Alaska), in forests and influenced by Russian fairy-tales. I have a bit of a thing for Scandinavia despite having never been there. If you're interested in the fairy-tale that influenced this novel then read it here, there is also this one that reminds me of The Snow Child even more so, it's one of my favourites, but Ivey refers to The Snow Maiden story by name so I'm guessing it's that one which inspired her. Though I'm not entirely sure.

If you want to read an excerpt of The Snow Child then you can read it at Ivey's website, here.

From Goodreads:

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.