The Snow Child
Eowyn Ivey
“Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart—he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season’s first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone—but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees” (littlebrown.com).
Major thematic elements: motherhood & parenthood, the supernatural, love & courage
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IB Literature and IB Language and Literature Connections
Place of publication: United States
Language: English
Era: 21st century
Genre: Fiction
Author: Female
Readers, writers and texts | Time and space | Intertextuality: Connecting texts
Identity | Culture | Creativity | Communication
Perspective | Transformation | Representation
Full text, basic summaries, and overviews
The Snow Child | OverDrive.com | Chapter Samples
Under the image of the text, click “Read a Sample” to read the first 74 pages online. You can check out the text for free on Libby.
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The Snow Child CH 1 | YouTube | Steve McGill | 17:26
This is a nice audio reading of chapter 1 of The Snow Child. Chapter 2 is also available here. It runs 17:24.
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Alaska author Eowyn Ivey’s debut novel ‘The Snow Child’ captivating the world | Anchorage Daily News | Ben Anderson | January 2012
This article was one of the first written about Ivey’s novel and was published by the biggest newspaper in Alaska. It includes overview of the text, an interview with Ivey, and summary of the novel’s reception in Norway, where it was first released.
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The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey | YouTube | Headline Books | 1:30
This video provides a short summary of the novel and would be a quick and engaging way to introduce the text to students.
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The Snow Child and related stories | D. L. Ashliman
This website lists 9 versions of the Snow Child, all of which are hyperlinked to the text they come from (look under the story excerpt for Source:…). You can read the stories via Google Books.
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Snow Child | Musical
The Snow Child was adapted into a musical. You can view the website of Georgia Stitt, who wrote the lyrics and co-wrote the music for the show, here. A PDF study guide for the musical is here. And linked below is a YouTube playlist with 14 videos from the musical.
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About the author
Eowyn Ivey: ‘I feel like I’ve always been trying to understand Alaska’ | The Guardian | Hannah Beckerman | August 2016
This interview was conducted after the publication of Ivey’s second novel, To the Bright Edge of the World.
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The magic of one of Alaska’s best writers — who might never write another novel | Anchorage Daily News | Charles Wohlforth | October 2016
This article provides insight to Ivey’s writing process and path to becoming an author, as well as an overview of her second novel.
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Eowyn Ivey - The Snowchild | YouTube | WHSmith | 5:15
Richard and Judy from the Richard and Judy Book Club interview Eowyn Ivey and discuss her novel The Snow Child.
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Interview with the Author - A Novel Idea 2013 - Eowyn Ivey | YouTube | Deschutes Public Library | 2:42
This interview is similar—but half the length—of the interview posted above.
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Whatcom Reads: An Evening with Eowyn Ivey | YouTube | City of Bellingham, Washington | 1:16:56
This is a long video, but key moments are identified in the video description so that you can chose segments that fit your needs. This discussion is centered on To the Bright Edge of the World.
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Articles, essays, and videos about The Snow Child
The Challenges of Adapting a Folk Tale | The History Press
This website looks at how to adapt a folk tale for an animated film. Though the goal of the adaptation is visual, the article contains important aspects of keeping true to a folk tale that students studying The Snow Child may find useful.
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Excerpt: Shakespeare and the Folktale | Shakespeare and Beyond
This article looks at the connections between traditional folktales and Shakespeare’s plays. We think it would serve as a useful piece to help students see the intertextuality involved in folktales and their transformations.
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Journal of Mythic Arts Nonfiction Archive | EndicottStudio.typepad.com
This website is full of great information, but what we like about this page in particular is the collection of nonfiction essays on myth and folklore (starts about a third of the way down the page). Have students explore independently or pull an essay or two to study as a class. We particularly enjoyed “The Folklore of Nettles” and “Wild Children.” If nothing else, this website shows how far-reaching, diverse, and extensive folktales are.
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Brothers Grimm fairy tales were never meant for kids | National Geographic | Isabel Hernández | September 2019
Need to make a clear distinction between folk tales and fairy tales and traditional fairy tales and Disney fairy tales? This article should help. The article “Censorship in Folklore” by D. L. Ashliman provides additional insight into how stories change over time.
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Settler colonial belonging and indigenous erasure in “The Snow Child” and “The Raven’s Gift” | University of Alaska | TiaAnna Tidwell, 2022
From the abstract: This paper examines how “both narratives ultimately avoid active dispossession in the settler colonial quest for land by creating and [sic] landscape in which indigeneity is already gone.”
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How ‘the Old Stories Persist’: Folklore in Literature after Postmodernism | C21 Literature | S. H. Binney | 2018
From the abstract: this paper examines “two related shifts apparent in twenty-first-century fiction: from the fairy tale to folklore, and from magic or the marvelous to the Todorovian fantastic…through two recent novels…A Summer of Drowning (2011) and…The Snow Child (2012). These novels create the fantastic differently, but both use a constellation of folklore, landscape, dreams, and hallucinations to maintain the Todorovian hesitation.”
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Free Direct Speech Presentation and Supernatural Ambiguity: The Making of a Fairy in Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child | Ad Alta: The Birmingham Journal of Literature | M. Cronin | 2017
This PDF contains many articles. This article is on page 5 (pdf page 13).
From the introduction: “In this article, I will explore how the presentation of [Faina’s] speech contributes to the supernatural ambiguity of her character. In particular, I will explore her unique Free Direct Speech presentation which ahs the unusual effect of altering the speech presentation of the characters who interact with her.”
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Lesson plans and other teaching resources
Lesson and unit plans for The Snow Child are still thin on the ground. If you know of a great resource we’ve missed, please let us know via our Contact Form.
How I Teach Folklore | Gladys F. Crawford
This isn’t a unit plan as much as it is a narrative by Crawford, reflecting on how she put a unit on folklore together. Crawford identifies which aspects of folklore were most important to her as an instructor, looks at folklore through a historical lens, discusses bringing in culturally relevant materials for her students, and how she structured her major assignments. This is an old article—Crawford references mimeographs, for example—but could still be used as an outline for a teacher creating a brand new unit for their classroom.
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Writing Folktales | The Kennedy Center | Lesson Plan
This lesson plan is designed for students in grades 6-8 but could easily be leveled up for high school students. To read the lesson plan, click either of the buttons: Get Printable Version or Copy to Google Drive.
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How to Adapt a Fairy Tale | Writers and Artists | Christina June | April 2018
In this article, June writes about how she adapted the core features of Cinderella for a contemporary story. This article could be adapted into a lesson by asking students to identify the classic elements of The Snow Child folk story and how they’ve been adapted for The Snow Child. This text could also be used with a study on folktales in general or as part of the beginning of a creative writing assignment.
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GCSE English Language Paper 1
This is an exam or sample exam which uses The Snow Child. An extract is available along with comprehension and analysis questions. See PDF pages 2-7.
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Year 11 GSCS English Revision Pack | Swinton.coopacademies.co.uk
This PDF is a scan of a hard copy and full disclosure: several of the pages are hard to read. But—there’s good stuff in here. Page 4 reviews academic language and vocabulary, pages 5-7 have a nice glossary. The pages related to The Snow Child are on pages 12-13 (overview of the assignment called Sample Exam—Paper 1), 14 (excerpt from The Snow Child), and pages 15-18 (graded responses). The rest of the packet includes tips and tricks for students writing responses to literary texts.
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Texts and other resources you may find helpful.
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The Snow Child
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To the Bright Edge of the World
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Russian Tales: Traditional Stories of Quests and Enchantments
Hardcover on Amazon.comBack to Browse by Title | Browse by Author
