2019 read #1: The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
391 pages
Published 2012
Read from January 2 to January 14
Rating: 3 out of 5

When authors approach folklore or other fantastic story elements from a literary perspective, they often show a certain reluctance to get their hands dirty. "Is this fantastic event really happening, or is it all in the mind of the protagonist?" and "Is this event really fantastic, or is there a perfectly mundane explanation?" are two of the most boring and tired cliches one could possibly use—certainly the least interesting questions one could examine with the storytelling tools the fantastic provides, close siblings of "It was all a dream." Yet while "It was all a dream" is rightly derided and nearly extinct outside of the crappier tiers of children's cartoons, these two cliches are seemingly mandatory for any lit fic writer who wants to dip a toe in the vast possibilities fantasy has to offer.

My advice, as an author who has never been published on a professional level and certainly has never been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is to embrace the fantastic. If you're going to write a novel based on a Russian folktale about a girl made out of snow, don't waste my time spinning major plot threads like "Only the old woman and her husband ever see the snow child, perhaps they are crazy with grief and isolation!" Especially when (spoilers!) such threads never turn into anything and everybody ends up seeing her after all as soon as a young man gets interested in her. Don't weave the beauty and strangeness of folktale magic into the heart of your novel, if you plan to reveal that, well actually, the ethereal snow child is an orphan who's been living in her family's abandoned homestead and this is all perfectly rational and explicable and dull.

Maybe my experiences with other literary works of fantasy have left me impatient with lit authors who hold their noses while they play with the fantastic. It isn't going to sully your perfect Pulitzer-worthy fingers to leave mundane explanations up to the tastes of the reader. Not everything has to be explained. This isn't hard sci-fi, after all.

Aside from that pet peeve, I found this book to be... fine? Adequate, somewhat moving, probably not something I'd nominate for a Pulitzer but pretty good overall. Though I certainly wanted something more magical from it, and that may have affected how I enjoyed it.