Book Review: The Snow Child

The Snow Child: A Novel by Eowyn Ivey (New York: Reagan Arthur Books, 2012. 400 pp)

Named after a character in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Eowyn Ivey was raised in Alaska and continues to live there with her husband and two daughters. Educated at Western Washington University and the University of Alaska, Anchorage, Ivey began her career as a reporter for the Frontiersman. Her award-winning articles have been published in the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Magazine, and other publications. Currently, Ivey works at Fireside Books, an independent bookstore. The Snow Child is Ivey’s debut novel.

The Space between Reality and Fantasy 

One of my favorite movies of all time, Pan's Labyrinth earned critical acclaim and an Academy Award for translating a fairy tale into an adult setting. With themes pondering war, politics, and a child growing up, the movie carries immense depth. Yet, my favorite motif in the film surrounds the perilous balance of reality and fantasy. As mythical creatures prance through the screen, the viewer is never certain if they are a figment of the protagonist’s imagination or a supposedly real being.

Photo by Robert Voors

In Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, the questions of reality versus fantasy weigh over the entire narrative. The novel’s protagonist’s, Jack and Mabel, are a childless elderly couple who have escaped their lives in the continental United States in order to live in the Alaska frontier of the 1920s. As the couple commences the project of transferring a homestead into a farm, their age becomes apparent:

“Mabel looked up and saw his windburned hands and frayed cuffs, the crow’s feet that spread at the corners of his downturned eyes. She couldn’t remember the last time she had touched that skin, and the thought ached like loneliness in her chest. Then she spotted a few strands of silver in his reddish-brown beard. When had they appeared? So he, too, was graying. Each of them fading away without the other’s notice” (10).

The Wilderness

The Alaskan wilderness is a desolate place. Dreams of a plentiful harvest are dashed on wintery Alaskan peaks. In fact, hopes of survival through their first winter focus in the sight of Jack’s rifle. Without a moose preserved in the shed, the couple faces starvation.

“When Jack told his brothers he was moving to Alaska, they envied him. God’s country, they’d said. The land of milk and honey. Moose, caribou, and bears—game so thick you won’t know what to shoot first. And the streams full of salmon, you can walk across their backs to the other side. What a different truth he found. Alaska gave up nothing easily. It was lean and wild and indifferent to a man’s struggle, and he had seen it in the eyes of that red fox” (61).

The Snow Child

Despite these conditions, the couple rejoices in the first snow of the year. In an act of whimsy, Jack and Mabel create a snowman (or more accurately, snow girl), fitted with mittens, a scarf, and a winter coat. Although the temperature cratered under freezing during the night, the couple discovers human tracks escaping the pile of snow, the remnants of the snow girl.

In the coming weeks, Jack and Mabel catch sight of a young girl, meandering through the woods in these harsh conditions.

 “There it was. A little figure dashed through the trees. Was that a skirt about the legs? A red scarf at the neck, and white hair trailing down the back. Slight. Quick. A little girl. Running at the edge of the forest. Then disappearing into the trees” (47-48).

Over time, the girl befriends Jack and Mabel. Named Faina, the snow girl traps wild game in the mountains and visits the couple typically around dinnertime, arriving with gifts of berries, animal proteins, or other edibles.

When winter secedes, so too does Faina. Her wild ways seem well suited for the winter conditions that climb in altitude as summer months emerge. At first, Jack and Mabel mourn the loss of a winter friend, but upon first snow, Faina faintly knocks on the couple’s door.

The story of Faina is shrouded in mystery. Her sudden appearance mimics Mabel’s favorite Russian fairy tale, The Snow Maiden. In this folk tale, an old, childless couple builds a snowman that magically conjures into a human child.

The Tension of Reality 

However, the question of her reality remains. On the one hand, her existence is confirmed by multiple sources. Fellow Alaskans find her trails; her touch is rooted; her smell is of the forest. Jack and Mabel experience Faina and consider her their own child.

Yet, portions of Faina are mysterious. The child survives the winter in a place that experienced trappers fail; she traverses snowpack for which most humans need snowshoes; in anger, she seemingly can summon alterations in the weather.

“The girl appeared and disappeared without warning, and it unnerved Jack. There was something otherworldly in her manners and appearance, her frosty lashes and cool blue stare, the way she materialized out of the forest. In ways she was clearly just a little girl, with her small frame and rare, stifled giggles, but in others she seemed composed and wise, as if she moved through the world with knowledge beyond anything Jack had encountered” (102).

Therein lies the intriguing question in The Snow Child. Much like Pan’s Labyrinth, The Snow Child requires the reader to sit in the tension of reality and fantasy. An argument can be made for both sides of the equation. If you can live with this tension, The Snow Child is a breathtaking, evocative, and heartbreaking novel. If you need conclusion, perhaps you should read something else.

Verdict: 4.5 out of 5

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Posted by: Donovan Richards

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Book Review: A Game of Thrones

A Game of Thrones: Book One of a Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin (New York: Bantum Books, 1996. 720 pp)

George R. R. Martin is an American author and screenwriter of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. Born in New Jersey, Martin earned a B.S. and M.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University. He began writing fiction in the early 1970s with his first works earning him a Hugo and Nebula award. In the 1980s, he began writing in Hollywood for the The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast. Martin is best known for his critically acclaimed epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, which was developed into Game of Thrones, an HBO television series.

The Consuming Quality of Role Playing Games

I have a friend who has metaphorically lost his life to World of Warcraft on multiple occasions. Fashioned around a fully realized fantasy world, World of Warcraft offered almost everything one would require in life. With an online community of support, my friend would play this computer game in marathon sessions as he battled enemy clans, bought and sold in the marketplace, and worked diligently to gain experience. Upon quitting the game (and selling his level 60 characters for a generous sum), my friend warned against the dangers of role-playing games (RPG) arguing that they remove individuals from reality by substituting in its place a fake world.

Similarly, despite my affinity toward sports video games, I find myself most often lost in an RPG. I can play a couple games of FIFA 12 and conclude my session in an hour. On the other hand, the RPGs I have owned impelled me to play for hour after hour until time melts into infinity.

For me, the draw to RPGs surrounds the concept of a universal made-up world. These games don’t focus on a single character in the world we know; they create from scratch an entirely separate plane.

To translate this illustration to literature, George R. R. Martin’s first installment in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, A Game of Thrones, carries similar life engulfing qualities.

Biblically weighted at over 700 pages, A Game of Thrones comprehensively tells the story of a fictionalized world in three separate settings. The principle storyline follows murder and political intrigue that brews war in the united Seven Kingdoms. The protagonist, Eddard Stark (Ned) rules the northern state of the Seven Kingdoms from Winterfell.

Danger in the Seven Kingdoms

Photo by Claudio.Ar

Upon housing Robert Baratheon, king of the Seven Kingdoms, in Winterfell, Ned learns about the death of the lord holding the office titled “the Hand of the King” and King Robert’s resulting wish for Ned to fulfill that vacant office. While honored by the offer, Ned feels wary about the position, especially considering both the dubious death of the previous Hand and the untrustworthy nature of Queen Cersei and her powerful family of House Lannister.

Traveling south to the capital city of King’s Landing to fulfill the office, Ned encounters evidence of political espionage that forces tension as rival nobles quarrel for positioning in the event of the unfortunate death of the King.

The Brotherhood of the Night’s Watch

In the second storyline, Ned’s bastard son, Jon Snow, swears an oath to the Brotherhood of the Night’s Watch. At the northernmost boundary of the Seven Kingdoms lies a 700-foot high and 300-mile-long wall fortifying the nation from the unruly and supernatural evils of the forest beyond the wall.

From legend, we learn that the forest is occupied by the children of the north, supernatural forces that bring life to dead men’s bones, and the darkness of winter.

By this last point it is important to note that this world experiences seasons in a remarkably different way than we normally do. For them, seasons last for years. In fact, currently, the Seven Kingdoms have lived in a 9-year-long summer. Seasons, as always, end; and the Stark family eerily pronounces that “winter is coming” at every turn of events.

Jon has sworn an oath with the Night’s Watch to protect the Seven Kingdoms from these evils beyond the wall as the winter darkness approaches. With summer comes hope and optimism; the purely horrific stories of winter have faded in citizen’s memories but Jon worries that the old wives’ tales of pure evil beyond the wall might be true.

A Dethroned King of the Dragons

Photo by One Lucky Guy

Finally, across the sea in the Free City of Pentos, Viserys Targaryen, deposed heir to the throne of the Seven Kingdoms, lives in exile with his sister Daenerys (Dany). With the hope of compiling an army to retake the throne from “usurper” King Robert, Viserys weds his sister to Khal Drogo, a powerful leader of the Dothraki, a nation of nomadic horse warriors.

The Targaryen family is said to have come from Dragons and for her wedding, Dany receives three fossilized dragon eggs for a wedding gift. Much like the dinosaur bones we see in museums, dragons in this world only exist in memorialized story and in fossilized bones.

Beautiful Prose and the Disconnect of Power

Setting aside the dense plot, Martin writes colorfully about his setting. Discussing Winterfell, the castle in the north through which the Stark family rules, he writes,

“The gods of Winterfell kept a different sort of wood. It was a dark, primal place, three acres of old forest untouched for ten thousand years as the gloomy castle rose around it. It smelled of moist earth and decay. No redwoods grew here. This was a wood of stubborn sentinel trees armored in grey-green needles, of mighty oaks, or ironwoods as old as the realm itself. Here thick black trunks crowded close together while twisted branches wove a dense canopy overhead and misshapen roots wrestled beneath the soil. This was a place of deep silence and brooding shadows, and the gods who lived here had no names” (18).

On top of the gorgeous writing that vividly depicts the setting of this story, Martin’s epic tale illustrates the evils of power and its disconnect with the common man.

“’The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends,’ Ser Jorah told her. ‘It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace.’ He gave a shrug. ‘They never are’” (196).

At the core of A Game of Thrones resides this very idea present in the previous quotation. Enemies to the north, the east, and at the center of the King’s court position themselves for the throne. Every step for each character leads them one step closer to open conflict and worldwide war.

With beautiful prose and an intriguing plot, Martin keeps the readers eyes glued to the page. Much like World of Warcraft consumed my friend into marathon sessions of game playing, A Game of Thrones kept me up at night as I found myself reading one more chapter; and then one more chapter; and then one more chapter. Of course, A Game of Thrones, like many RPGs, is not for everyone. I highly recommend this book for those who enjoy epic literature and fantasy novels.

Verdict: 5 out of 5

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Posted by: Donovan Richards

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Book Review: The Magician King

The Magician King by Lev Grossman (New York: Viking Press, 2010. 400 pp.)

Born in 1969, Lev Grossman has a degree in literature from Harvard, and spent three years at Yale in the Ph.D. program in comparative literature. He writes for TIME as their book reviewer and as one of its technology writers. Codex (2004) became an international bestseller, and The Magicians (2009) was named one of the best books of 2009 by The New Yorker. In August of 2001, he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He also has a wife and two daughters.

Sequels are Dangerous

Sequels are a dangerous thing. In looking at literature throughout the ages, sequels fall into one of two categories: either they rest on the laurels of their predecessors, or they continue to develop characters and plot even deeper than before. I think that The Magician King falls into the latter category for one reason in particular—Lev Grossman develops Quentin, the protagonist, as a character. In this sequel, the reader delves into the deeper inner-workings of Quentin’s soul. We find out that he, like so many of us, wishes to be a hero.

Didn't You Know that You're My Hero?

As a child, I paraded around the house wearing my Superman cape. I know, in retrospect the far more logical, far more bad-ass choice would have been Batman, but you can’t win them all. I thought Superman was the coolest—he could fly, shoot lasers out of his eyes, couldn’t be penetrated by bullets, and won the affection of a lady (Lois Lane). So, I wanted to be Superman, despite the red underwear eccentrically worn on the outside of his pants/tights. I ended up falling a little short (still working on the shooting lasers thing), but I think in my heart I still want to save the world, or at least save something.

I think that in every person’s core, there is a desire to be heroic. Now, I don’t mean that everyone wants to save the world from hunger, cure cancer, or even do something so minute as to give a dollar to someone who is homeless. I mean that people want to have a positive impact on their surroundings in some way—even just to one person. The protagonist, Quentin, is immersed in his new world, Fillory (discussed in a previous review), as a King, and yet he feels that his life is incomplete. Something just isn’t right. He wants an adventure. Or does he?

Quentin’s Heroic Quest

Photo by Ranga Krishna Tipirneni

Quentin, convinced that he needs to go on a new adventure (the previous having occurred in the novel The Magicians), does just that. He finds an excuse to round up a ship, in order to travel to an island in the middle of nowhere to collect taxes for the kingdom. While on the island, he finds a quest—to search for seven golden keys (whose purpose I won’t reveal to you, so the book isn’t spoiled). Along the way, he has some introspective revelations about his character.

“If he hadn’t been so tired, and a bit drunk, it probably wouldn’t have struck him the way it did. But as it was he felt himself filling up with a sense of—how could he put it? He thought he’d learned a lesson about the world, and now he was realizing that the lesson he learned might have been the wrong one. The right adventure had been offered to him, and he walked away. If being a hero is a matter of knowing your cues, like the fairy tale [the one about the golden keys] said, he’d missed his. Instead he’d spend three days faffing around on Earth for nothing, and nearly got stuck there forever, while Eliot was off on a real quest” (223).

What it Really Means to be a Hero

Finally, Quentin has an epiphany. Everything he is missing, the hole he had in his life, is because he didn’t realize he wanted to be a hero. And, he is given a chance.

Photo by Christopher Hawkins

Quentin finds himself to be a rather adept magician, and he follows the trail of the golden keys; he travels to Brakebills, Venice, and throughout Fillory. He and his friend Julia (who, as a side-note, also takes up a large portion of the novel with her own story and how she developed magician herself) even fight death in order to restore the world (again I’m purposefully not revealing some details here).

In the end, Quentin finds that being a hero frankly sucks.

“‘This isn’t how it ends!’ Quentin said. ‘I am the hero of this god-damned story, Ember! Remember? And the hero gets the reward!’

‘No, Quentin,’ the ram said. ‘The hero pays the price’” (396).

Quentin is forced to find, through his adventure that being a hero doesn’t mean that the grass is greener. Being a hero requires sacrifice—it happened to Superman whom I tried to so fiercely imitate as a child. And, sacrifice changes people for the better, as Quentin finds out.

This book surprised me, as I’m eternally dubious of sequels. They tend to lack substance, plot, and redeeming qualities. Not so with The Magician King. In fact, I liked it just as much as the first book, if not more. As a result, I’m very much looking forward to his next novel in the series, entitled The Magician’s Land, which will be heavily influenced by The Tempest, The Phantom Tollbooth, Casino Royale (James Bond Novels), and some P.G. Wodehouse of all people. I’m also looking forward to the FOX TV Series based off The Magicians, which is currently in the works—this series could turn out to be quite the entertaining enterprise.

Verdict: 5 out of 5
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Posted by: Andrew Jacobson

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Book Review: The Magicians

The Magicians by Lev Grossman (New York: Penguin Group, 2009. 402pp).

Lev Grossman is the senior writer and book critic for TIME. Among several notable publications, he has written for The New York Times, Wired, and The Wall Street Journal. At only forty-two years of age, he is beginning to gain wide acclaim for his work in TIME magazine as well as his novels.

Doubt and Humanity 

I love fantasy novels. I find that they provide a way of escape from a world filled with some terrible things. In fact, I re-read The Chronicles of Narnia every summer, and have done so since I was about fifteen years old. I’ve also read the Harry Potter novels, and loved every moment.

Unlike Harry Potter, Quentin (the protagonist) of The Magicians gets snatched into the magical realm just before college, and as a result is a little behind the curve. Fantasy aficionados saw Harry Potter go through magical high school, and with this book they see Quentin attend magical college. When Quentin is accepted for a particular adept magic trick which actually and unknowingly uses real magic, his reaction is one to be expected.

“Part of him, the part he trusted least, wanted to leap on this idea like a puppy on a ball. But in light of everything else that had ever happened to him, in his entire life, he checked himself. He’d spent too long being disappointed by the world – he’d spend so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn’t the only world, and coping with the overwhelming evidence that it in fact was. He wasn’t going to be suckered in just like that. It was like finding a clue that somebody you’d buried and mourned wasn’t really dead after all” (37).

The author portrays Quentin as a real human being; he draws his themes from the aspiration to escape the monotony of this world. Quentin just doesn’t believe this change is happening to him, and he fights the reality that he’s becoming a magician throughout the novel. His reluctance to accept this truth makes his character believable because magic is, by definition, extraordinary, and we, too, would act similarly given the same circumstances.

Photo by Dmitri B.

Once accepted into college, Quentin attends classes, studies, and makes friends, and is involved in extra-curricular activities as well. Those at Brakebills College of Magic play an inter-collegial game called welters. Similar to NCAA sports, colleges of magic compete for supremacy in welters, much like in Harry Potter and the game of quidditch. Quentin’s team, obviously making fun of Harry Potter, does not take the sport seriously.

“‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘Gotta get my quidditch costume. I mean uniform. I mean welters’” (129).

After college, life becomes a series of monotonous parties and frequent sex. But, soon a forgotten friend from college greets Quentin and invites him to travel with him to what he thought was a fictional land named “Fillory”.

Fillory 

In The Magicians, Quentin and his group of friends religiously read a collection of stories on the land of “Fillory” much like I have my annual Narnia readings. These books on "Fillory" are famous, and children and nerdy adults alike read them for entertainment. Quentin loves the novels and, once accepted into the college at Brakebills, he doesn’t lose his interest in them. Just like my Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe binges during the summer, Quentin delves into the Fillory novels with great intensity. Much like in The Chronicles of Narnia, there's even a requirement for two queens and kings to rule the land from a magnificent white castle on the coast.

“As he usually did when he was stuck at home, he went on a Fillory binge. The old 1970s-era covers looked more and more dated every time he saw them, with their psychedelic Yellow Submarine palette, and on a couple of them the covers had come off completely and had been tucked back between the pages as bookmarks. But the world inside the books was as fresh and vital as ever, unfaded and unironized by time” (167).

Quentin also wants his own Fillory-like adventure. But fears he never will encounter such fantastical events in such a mundane world. The professors around Quentin try to remind him that he will never really have an adventure, and that magic can be quite boring.

“‘You are not going on a mystical adventure here, Quentin. This process will be long and painful and humiliating and very, very’ – he practically shouted the word – ‘boring’ ” (144).

Familiar Adventure 

Photo by Adam Foster

With super-obvious foreshadowing, Quentin and company finally travel to Fillory, which turns out to be not fictional at all. The group wants the adventure, and they get it; only to be reminded by the equivalent of Aslan, a ram named Ember that the magicians should not use other worlds as a playground for an adventure. Perhaps their own adventure can be found in their own world.

“‘I am sorry you came here,’ Ember said. ‘Children of Earth. No one asked you to come. I am sorry that our world is not the paradise you were looking for. But it was not created for your entertainment. Fillory’ – the old ram’s jowls shook – ‘is not a theme park, for you and your friends to play dress-up in, with swords and crowns’” (351).

There’s a lesson learned here, and Quentin takes it to heart: You may look for paradise and never find it, but you must be okay with who you are, and with whatever may happen along the way. Quentin loses lovers, friends, and confidence. But, toward the end of the story, he finds redemption. He meets his heroes, fights great enemies, and has the adventure he always wanted.

There’s humor, reality, seriousness, sex, anger, fights, drunkenness, collegiality, adventure, mockery, and suspense all present in The Magicians. If you like fantasy novels, read this book. If you don’t like fantasy novels and want to read a complete mockery of fantasy novels, read this book. The Magicians is a fantastic book that you can’t put down if you tried, and one that once you’re done will undoubtedly re-read every summer.

Verdict: 5 out of 5
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Posted by: Andrew Jacobson

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