This month's book group pick for Mayberry, NH (
SPOILERS! Run Away! Now! AAAAUUUUIGGGGHHH!
Her husband, Jack, is doing all the farm labor, which traps her indoors with no company and a bunch of screwy ideas about how being around people will be good for her somehow. Just as he's contemplating going to work in the mine, another family sort of adopts them. They are everything our aging childless couple is not, and at around the same time _that_ happens, the couple gets all giddy and makes a snowman, snow child, and then they start seeing a girl flitting around in the area. They don't talk about her much, and when they do, they are disbelieved, but the joy of seeing her and eventually talking to her gets them through a tough winter.
There's a turn for the worse: Jack is dragged by his horse and seriously injured. As they are about to return to their family, the adoptive family shows up and plants their field (along with the woman's assistance, which, predictably, cheers Mabel up. Hey, occupational therapy isn't some kind of joke, people.). Garrett, the youngest, troublemaker boy, thrives with Jack and Mabel and he sticks around for a while. Predictably, as the years pass, he hooks up with the snow child now maiden, Faina, who acquires a backstory to explain her presence and skillset.
But Mabel to Garrett and Faina has always been bookish, and she allows Ivey to bludgeon us with the fact that this is a retelling of a whole bunch of Russian fairy tales about the snow maiden who, when domesticated, dies. And while Ivey allows Mabel to contemplate an alternative ending, that does not happen. Faina has a baby with Garrett, comes down with a fever, runs off into the woods and never returns (presumed eaten by wolves).
Yuck.
The epilogue shows the happy-ish extended family (Garrett, his parents, and the "old couple") raising Jay, Faina's boy.
On the one hand, it's a pretty excellent retelling in a clever setting: Alaska during the '20s, homesteaders selling stuff to the railroad and some of them doing well enough to ship a Model T out to drive around on crappy roads (one of Garrett's brothers). On the other hand, it's a category of fairy tales that I just loathe. Also, Ivey is Not Subtle about what she is doing; this is a plot driven book AND Mabel grew up with a book about the snow maiden and sends away to her sister to get it. Ada writes a long letter with a gloss on the category of fairy tales -- okay, Ivey, we GET IT. Jeez.
It'll be interesting to hear what the group thinks. It may be that I'm hypersensitive to what is necessary to accomplish the author's task.
Source:
http://walkitout.livejournal.com/1005786.html