I should not like this book, but I do. Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child has an unpromising start. Mabel, a nervy wreck of a woman, decides that her loveless life is not worth living. She strides out into the Alaskan wastes seeking a quiet death.
It is a cliché worn thin by bad television drama, and it gets worse. Mabel fails to die, of course, and she returns to the log cabin which she shares — ‘live together’ would connote more intimacy than exists between them — with her withered husband, Jack. They then co-exist in silence for the next 50 pages. It was a slog for them; and it was a slog for me.
The year is 1920, or thereabouts, and Jack and Mabel have recently moved to Alaska in search of solace after the still-birth of a child.
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