Jack's eyes becoming accustomed to the darkness and alight upon Faina's own child, the child of the snow child, dancing in the falling snow. Jack and Mabel, gazing through their window, see past the reflection of their two old faces 'to make out the figures in the night'.

Cradling a swaddled infant in their arms, mothers would distractedly touch their lips to their babies' foreheads. But in the last moments of the novel, light and darkness combine in a moment of hope. Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child She had watched other women with infants and eventually understood what she craved: the boundless permission-no, the absolute necessity- to hold and kiss and stroke this tiny person. It is when the evenings takes on a thinner quality that she is found, sickening, lying atop her wedding quilt in a 'night that was cool and pale blue'.Ĭhildless and full of longing, Mabel carries her own darkness, one in which it is easy to find a resonance. As if perishing in the exposure to the light, Faina, now a young woman with her own child, is drawn to the mountains, 'where the spring never comes and the snow never melts'. With the passing years, the coming of each spring heralds the loss of the snow child, little by little. The child, Faina, who emerges from the snow, seems in part to be forged from the darkness the long nights give Faina to Mabel and Jack, while the spring, when darkness recedes and the snow melts, takes her from them.

The red cranberry of the girl's lips, on the white, is brighter against the night sky. And it is on the first night of winter, when 'through the window, the night appeared dense, each snowflake slowed in its long, tumbling fall through the black', that the couple, momentarily carefree, build a girl out of snow. Symbolic, by turns, of both good and ill, it brings Mabel anguished dreams of 'snowflakes and naked babies tumbled through her nights', yet summons up the time she first fell in love with her husband, which she remembers as 'flying above the warm inky black night'. Yet the role of darkness is sometimes reversed in this tale of enchantment, so entwined does it become with the appearance of the child.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey