Last month for our local library’s adult book club we read Eowyn Ivey’s debut novel, The Snow Child, which went on to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. For a few years my wife has been telling me to read it, and I promise that I was always interested — just waiting for the right moment. I’m glad that moment finally came. The novel is beautiful.

It’s also not at all what I expected.

I knew going in that the book was inspired by the old, oft-retold tale of the snow child — a couple, unable to have children, builds one from snow and it comes to life. The novel includes quotations from several version of the story, and I anticipated something lovely and mystical. It is that. But it’s also grounded, raw, and real. There’s a moving interplay between the magical and the mundane, between fairy tale and frontier.

Set in Alaska in 1920, the novel begins with Jack and Mabel, who have recently moved there from Pennsylvania. They are trying to start over, especially Mabel, who is still reeling from the loss of their only child at birth. From the first pages, it’s clear that Ivey isn’t shying away from the weight of grief:

Mabel had known there would be silence.That was the point, after all. No infants cooing or wailing. No neighbor children playfully hollering down the lane. No pad of small feet on wooden stairs worn smooth by generations, or clackety-clack of toys along the kitchen floor. All those sounds of her failure and regret would be left behind, and in their place there would be silence.

But the Alaska silence is not what she was imagined. As she and Jack approach their second brutal winter, Mabel contemplates escape, not just from the homestead, but from life itself:

There were guns in the house, and she had thought of them before. The hunting rifle beside the bookshelf, the shotgun over the doorway, and a revolver that Jack kept in the top drawer of the bureau. She had never fired them, but that wasn’t what kept her. It was the violence and unseemly gore of such an act, and the blame that would inevitably come in its wake. People would say she was weak in mind or spirit, or Jack was a poor husband. And what of Jack? What shame and anger would he harbor?

The river, though — that was something different. Not a soul to blame, not even her own. It would be an unfortunate misstep.

Mabel doesn’t end up drowning in the river, but her grief lingers like the winter. Then, on the night of the season’s first snowfall, she and Jack step outside momentarily carefree, and build a snow child. The next morning, the snow child is gone — and a real child appears in the woods.

If you’re like me, you might think you know where this is going. The climax, surely, will be the coming spring: what will become of the snow child when the thaw arrives? But Ivey doesn’t follow that expected arc. That answer comes sooner than anticipated. What follows is a deeply felt exploration of time’s passage, of the quite magic of loving someone through hardship, and the of the grace we feel when someone’s presence — ephemeral or enduring — reminds us that life itself can be miraculous, with no enchantment required.

Reading The Snow Child reminded me that stories don’t have to shout to be powerful. Ivey’s prose is quiet and deliberate, like footsteps in fresh snow, and yet it carries immense emotional weight. This is a novel for readers who appreciate a slow, patient unfolding—who find wonder in the natural world, in complicated relationships, and in the thin veil that sometimes separates reality from myth. It’s a story about grief and survival, but also about joy and renewal, and the way those opposites often coexist.

If you’re in the mood for something tender yet haunting, something that lingers long after the final page, I can’t recommend this one enough. I’m grateful my wife kept nudging me toward it.