to the bright edge of the world by eowyn ivey

Unfortunately, Faina’s childbirth was long and hard. It was when Garrett went to Jack to ask for Faina’s hand in marriage that Jack realized that he and Mabel had become Faina’s parents.

In the course of their relationship, Faina got pregnant.

Their son, Garrett, fell in love with Faina. Although they had told their neighbor friends about her, the neighbors doubted her existence until they happened to visit the cabin one day while Faina was there. Her behavior so paralleled that of the girl in Mabel’s fairy tale that she believed the child had actually come from the snowman until Jack told Mabel he knew Faina was not a snow fairy because he had helped to bury her father.įor years Mabel and Jack were the only ones who ever saw Faina. In the summer she went further up the mountains, in order to stay where it was cold. The child, whom they learned was named Faina, refused to stay with Jack and Mabel permanently but visited regularly especially during the winter months. After Mabel saw the girl as well she began to associate the child with the heroine from the Russian fairy tale “The Snow Maiden” that her father had read to her when she was a child. She had taken the gloves and scarf from the snowman he and Mabel had made. Jack got up that night and spotted a young girl in the woods. Together they built a snowman that they dressed and decorated like a little girl.

Mabel met Jack at the barn and they played together in the snow the first snowfall. He’d just about decided to work in the coal mines over the winter when a neighboring family befriended him and Mabel. Jack meanwhile dealt with his own problems as he struggled to tame fields for crops and feed himself and Mabel over the winter. Instead she felt they had drifted further apart. She returned home, thinking of the way she had planned for she and Jack to work together on their homestead in Alaska. She hoped the ice on the river would give way under her weight and she would drown but her suicide attempt was not successful. Mabel was thinking about the death of her only baby when she considered killing herself. When they lost Faina the two were able to grieve together, something they had not been able to do when they lost their infant son years before.

Through their experiences with Faina and the work they dedicated to their new life in Alaska, Mabel and Jack grew closer to one another and their relationship matured. When they befriended a mysterious young girl, named Faina, who lived alone in the Alaskan wilderness, Jack and Mabel became surrogate parents for this child. Mabel encouraged her husband, Jack, to take a chance and move to Alaska so she could get away from the sounds of children, which to her were reminders that she was childless, in the book “The Snow Child” by Eowyn Ivey.

To the bright edge of the world by eowyn ivey