This Friday, Jan. 18, from 5:30 – 8 p.m. the Alaska Humanities Forum will host a Meet the Author reception for Alaskan writer Eowyn Ivey. Her novel The Snow Child is the 2013 selection for Anchorage Reads, an Anchorage Public Library program that promotes literacy and community-building by encouraging people of different ages and backgrounds to engage in a shared reading experience and discussion of a single book.
Anchorage Reads is funded in part by a 2013 Alaska Humanities Forum General Grant.
Please join us for food, spirits, and the opportunity to meet Eowyn
Ivey at the Forum offices in Ship Creek, located at 161 East 1st Ave,
in the historic Alaska Railroad freight depot building.
The Snow Child tells the story of Mabel and Jack, two childless homesteaders living a hard life in Alaska in the 1920s.
According to a glowing National Public Radio review that aired last month,
The kernel of its story begins in fairy tale and myth — in a book that homesteader Mabel read during her Massachusetts girlhood. The book, published in Russian in 1857, belonged originally to her father, and tells the story of "Snegurochka," or "the Snow Maiden," a girl, half-human and half ice and snow, who comes into the life of a childless old couple. Mabel has half-remembered this volume, and asks her sister back East to send it to her. Why? She and Jack have, in the middle of a winter, fashioned a snow child of their own, in front of their cabin — only to imagine, at first, that it has come to life in the person of a blond-haired feral girl with a red fox as a mascot.
The child's name is Faina, and she brings hope and new passion to the marriage of Mabel and Jack. [...]
A full calendar of Anchorage Reads events is available at www.AnchorageLibrary.org, or click here.
To download a flier for this Friday’s Meet the Author event, click on the link below.
