Saturday, February 25, 2012

What is Eowyn Ivey reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Eowyn Ivey, author of The Snow Child.

Her entry begins:
It’s rare for me to reread a book, but that’s what I’m doing right now with Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. I read it a few years ago, but then my book club chose it this month, so I’m enjoying it a second time. I have never come across another novel like this – it’s so laugh-out-loud funny and quirky, and yet doesn’t fall into that trap of being cynical or mean-spirited. It is somehow very genuine and tender. I never imagined I would so love a book that’s basically about...[read on]
About the book, from the publisher:
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.
Learn more about the book and author at Eowyn Ivey's website and blog.

Writers Read: Eowyn Ivey.

--Marshal Zeringue