The description of The Snow Child kinda intrigued me when it first came out, and I do love novels that put a fresh spin on old 
fairy tales. Then a friend mentioned loving it, so I thought, why not, and put it on my digital library holds, because it’d be fine as a dog-walking read, probably.
The novel focuses on an older couple, Jack and Mabel, who moved to Alaska and are homesteading there in the 1910s following heartbreaks in their former life on the East Coast, particularly around their inability to have children. Homesteading is hard and isolating, though, and both struggle with that, but on one snowy night, they reconnect and make a snow figure of a little girl, and out of whimsy, deck it out with mittens and a scarf. The next day, the snow figure is busted up and the scarf and mittens are gone, and both Jack and Mabel start seeing glimpses of a little girl in the woods, which may or may not be their snow person come to life, and may or not be the Russian fairy tale of the Snow Maiden coming to pass in reality. In the meantime, they also get to know their nearest neighbors, the more established family of Esther and George (and especially their youngest son, Garrett), who think this snow child is just a story or a cabin fever imagining (particularly of Mabel). The girl, whose name turns out to be Faina (fah-EE-nah) is no delusion, but what is she really?
It’s a sweet enough story. Jack and Mabel are lonely but kind, and genuinely love each other; Esther is a force of nature, but her practicality is good-hearted even if her skepticism wounds Mabel at times, and Garrett is a nice kid laboring under youngest child syndrome. Faina is a perfect angel snow baby. Hard things happen, people have to reckon with their own foibles and failings, lessons are learned, there is an ending that is weird and melancholy and I’m not mad about it but also not sure how well it really holds up when I think about it.
But the thing that’s odd and bothersome is everything that isn’t in this story. It’s Alaska in the 1910s and 1920s, one of the last frontier-like places in America, but after all the deconstruction we’ve done in the last 30-ish years of myths of the Wild West, it feels odd to have a story that is utterly, entirely, 100% uncritical of white settlers. Everyone here is basically good, Native Americans are mentioned maybe once but otherwise simply do not exist in the place or the narrative, and Garrett’s trapping, while quite entrepreneurial, was also a practice that was pretty ecologically devastating throughout North America from the 1600s until the conservation movement (which is kicking into higher gear around the time this story takes place) starts reining it in. If you want a cozy story with a fairy tale twinge, this might scratch the itch–but if you’re like me, everything this story won’t tell (and yet is really a Big Deal in terms of time and place) becomes a very loud, very obvious present absence, and the aftertaste is just a little off. Faina herself basically stands in as a kind of Native character, maybe (or, sure, nature fairy), but the thing is that she is fair and blonde and undeniably of European extraction and it drove home to me what was not there.
Also, the audio version for some reason feels the need to throw in an intrusive, blatantly manipulative sentimental musical cue in the last minute that absolutely threw me out of the ending. Why would one do that?!