Eowyn Ivey’s debut novel The Snow Child begins with sharp, icy reality as we step out into the silent Alaskan wilderness with Mabel. An aging homesteader who can no longer abide the distance that childlessness and numbing work have built between herself and her husband Jack, she is ready to let the winter claim her. But it isn’t long before we, with Mabel, have caught the rusty flash of fur between the trees and found ourselves compelled to follow it into an alternate world of enchantment.

In this retelling of the Russian fairy tale, Jack and Mabel leave everything but their sorrows in Pennsylvania and start a new life in Alaska. But the long, dark winters reinforce their loneliness and disappointments, and the more they try to reach out for one another, the further they seem to drift apart. Then one evening, during a surprise snowfall, the couple find themselves delighting in the snow like a pair of children. Snow angels lead to snowmen, and soon they are fashioning a delicate little girl from snow and dressing her in a red scarf and mittens. Inexplicably, the next morning she is gone, and soon after they begin to have mysterious sightings of a wild girl and a fox in the forest. Cautiously, they coax her out. As she learns to trust them, they name her Faina, and a most unusual relationship begins.

But who is she, and where did she come from? Is she a lone survivor, as Jack believes, or the miracle Mabel insists?

Mabel recalls reading as a child a Russian fairy tale about a snow baby who comes to life. She goes so far as to write to her sister Ada, discretely asking if she remembers the book. Ada, enclosing the volume with her return letter, writes that she never put much stock in such things in her youth, but:

In my old age, I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.

Have they found magic? Or are Jack and Mabel both wrong about Faina, and she is simply a figment of their loneliness and desires? And does it matter? The love they have for her—and the love for each other that her presence rekindles—is real. That real love is what thaws their resistance to the life-giving local community and sustains them when circumstances turn sad once again.

Ron Charles, in his otherwise admiring review in the Washington Post, notes that the book is overlong. Though a number of passages could be cut with no harm to the story—which is ultimately a simple one—Ivey’s writing is lovely and a pleasure to read. The wild beauty of Alaska emerges, one berry, one branch, and one river otter at a time, the landscape as much a character as Faina.

The world Ivey evokes is one of hope in desperation, community in isolation, tenderness in mutual pain. And the balance she achieves between reality and fantasy invites the reader to participate in the storytelling and consider with Ada whether perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.

This review is cross-posted at The Discarded Image, where I am fiction reviews editor.

Paris in the Jazz Age. A backdrop to art, literature, fashion, music, sparkling cocktails, catty society, public sexuality, political intrigue, and parties so lavish that the famous guests compete to be the entertainment. Rafaela Fano, American and seventeen, arrives in Paris not of her own will. But soon she is in love. The light, the architecture, the dresses—it’s thrillingly more than she anticipated when she was forcibly shipped off to marry a now-lost cousin. Doing what she must to stay and survive, she accepts anonymity in the glittering city—until she becomes the most famous model of artist Tamara de Lempicka.

The Last Nude, Ellis Avery’s second novel, re-imagines the relationship between the celebrated Art Deco artist and her most inspiring muse. Part One, and the bulk of the novel, is told from Rafaela’s point of view, sixteen years after they meet. She recounts their chance connection, Tamara’s offer to earn a little money modeling for her, the understated elegance of her apartment, the artistic discipline and brilliance she observes, and her own shock at being sexually aroused by this mysterious, self-possessed woman. Their passion is transferred to the canvas, where Tamara’s paintings of Rafaela win her recognition and a line of collectors. But their expectations are not shared. Rafaela recognizes, looking back, the naïveté of her youth, the clarifying lessons of first love and the seeds of the confidence she will live by later.

Part Two, much shorter and darker than the first, is Tamara’s story. It is decades later, and in her final days of decline she reflects on her achievements and her lost relationships. The structure is unusual; the shift in perspective is abrupt, and Rafaela’s story as told in the middle distance already feels complete. But then Tamara’s wandering memories—like light from an unexpected angle—reveal significant later encounters that changed the story, if her memory and her willful revisions can be trusted.

Avery’s writing is strikingly simple, spare sentences vibrating with the language of color and texture, occasionally flecked with French. The story is fiction, erotica, history. A handful of settings—Rafaela’s flat, Tamara’s apartment, an art gallery, a bridge on the Seine—evoke the intimacy of a stage. The cultural icons of the 1920s walk on and off; a few simply are mentioned in the wings. Some scenes are quiet tableaus, accompanied only by the flick of a paintbrush or the turn of a page, while others unfurl cinematically in silk and peacock feathers.

The Last Nude is a love story between two women, between an artist and her muse, between an artist’s skill and her admirers, and between a vivacious city at the end of era and her most memorable residents. It asks the unanswerable questions: What is the elusive quality that makes a painting art? How can a person’s essence be so completely depicted by another? How do the events of our past add up to a life? How do the hurts of our youth become sweet memories of age? And who would we be if we had never met the other?

This book review is cross-posted at The Discarded Image.

Just a quick note to remind you that I’m doing some writing over at The Discarded Image, where the focus is “the hunt for belief changing ideas.” I generally cross-post my book reviews here so I can keep track of them in my archives, but there are other discussions there that I may forget to mention here.

The latest, from our Reviews in the Wild series, is a discussion about just how much we readers expect historical fiction to be based on “fact.” The questions were raised in a provocative review, published by the Guardian, of Anna Funder’s debut novel, All That I Am. Please do drop by and leave a comment with your perspective. And while you’re there, I hope you’ll take a moment to poke around and join in on any other conversations you find relevant.

That’s it for tonight. We now return you to your regularly scheduled reading!

What, if anything, consoles you in your darkest hour? The human capacity to believe—to ascribe purpose to deity or destiny—in the face of evil and deepest loss is the thread that binds Jane Bradley’s debut novel, You Believers.

One young woman believes she can survive anything if she just stays positive.

Another believes a voice from the dead saved her life.

A man believes he is untouchable, a fearless devil with a right and a destiny to control others.

A formerly devout mother shakily returns to Christian faith when her daughter goes missing.

A search and rescue worker who experiences the best and worst of humanity believes in moving forward anyway, one day at a time.

The story begins on a summer day when Katy Connor goes out shopping and never returns. People go missing every day, says the narrator, Shelby Waters:

It happens like that. You think you’re going home. And some picture of your face ends up on a grainy black-and-white flyer tacked to a phone pole. Your image fades in sunlight. The thin paper sign of you tatters, fluttering in the breeze. Strangers pass by, study your face for something familiar, think maybe they’ve seen you somewhere. But they haven’t. You are a stranger. You are lost.

Shelby knows. She faced that personal loss years ago and now faces it daily on her clients’ behalf. She’s the hardscrabble private detective you call “when you’ve got nothing left but worry and waiting for the phone to ring.” When Katy Connor goes missing and the police believe she’s run off with a drug-dealer boyfriend, Katy’s fiancé Billy and mother Livy turn to Shelby to take up the search.

Despite their shared loss, Billy and Livy cannot grieve and wait together. As the empty weeks stretch on, Livy returns to the Bible verses that used to sustain her, telling herself to focus on the positive, to have faith, to pray harder, convinced God will reward her sacrifices. Billy, meanwhile, drinks himself under the table, lashing out at Livy and his friends for their stiff politeness, their ungrounded positivity, their false assurances.

They were saying something about time. Oh, God, Livy was saying something about in the Lord’s own time. She was trying to climb back into her religion, like religion was a tree you could climb into to keep you safe from a flood. Billy couldn’t stand any more of anyone’s words that kept trying to say everything was going to be all right.

Shelby does what she can to support both of them without taking her eyes off the end game: finding Katy’s body. She, too, has her own way of facing the worst. She trusts her gut. She puts one foot in front of the other. She stocks her truck with Valium, blankets, shovels. In one emotional scene, when Livy asks her if she believes in anything, she replies, “I believe in a lot of things.”

“Like what?”
“Like the world of the living.”
“That’s a start,” she said. “No afterlife?”
“I believe in the living and the dead.”
“Do you believe in spirits? Is that why you do this, to put lost souls to rest?”
“I do what I do to put the living to rest.”

So Shelby continues her search, interviewing, visiting Katy’s favorite places, following the cadaver dogs through the woods. There’s no need for a spoiler alert here. The reader knows from the first page that Katy will not be coming home, yet Bradley maintains a taut suspense and an increasing pace in her slow revelation of details. She also builds strong empathy for her broken characters, including those that have caused so much devastation to others. The diversity and complexities of their responses to loss are the emotional engine driving the story forward.

So whose beliefs are “right”? In the end, Bradley’s characters survive not because of the substance of their faith, but simply because of its existence. Livy’s prayers do not bring her daughter back. Shelby’s relentless search and rescue work doesn’t end her own suffering. But each person finds something to commit to, and that commitment gives them a reason to go on surviving.

You Believers is an intensely quiet thriller that dignifies the human spirit even as it reveals the darkest impulses and contradictions of the soul.

This book review is cross-posted at The Discarded Image. 

This is the stage of winter when I deeply experience the doldrums, waiting for the daffodils to do a little more than just peek out their heads. Happily, there is no shortage of books to distract me from the gray skies.

In the last few weeks, I’ve read a book that’s been on my list for a long time, Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book, and a new release, Eowyn Ivey’s debut The Snow Child. The latter admittedly was less helpful in ignoring winter, but it was a lovely story all the same. I’m working on reviews of both.

I also read How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life, by Mameve Medwed, which I’d picked up in a library book sale. I can’t remember how that one first came to my attention, and I wish I could, because it wasn’t at all what I expected. Somehow I went into it thinking it was rather literary; my mistake. It did get me through an unpleasant session in the dentist’s chair, though!

Now I’m about a quarter of the way into Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone, another title that’s been on my list way too long. None of the characters have captured me yet, but it seems to have epic ambitions so I am reserving judgment to see how much it fulfills that promise. And tomorrow I’m heading to the library to pick up my latest reserve notification, Ellis Avery’s second novel, The Last Nude.

What are you reading in this final stretch of winter?