Faina (Part I)

Disclaimer: This is a summary the events that have transpired in the novel in my past reading, not an analysis of the chapters.  I felt that the events were important enough to the novel that they deserved their own post.  With that being said, a true analysis of the snow child's effects on Mabel and Jack will be coming soon! So without further ado.... 

Finally! Readers have been formally introduced to the character known as 'the snow child'.  Her name is Faina and she is proving to be a very complex character thus far.  To begin where I left off in my last post, Faina had just sat down for dinner with Jack and Mabel.  They had a wonderful time, despite the fact that Faina did not speak a single word, and when dinner was finished Faina disappeared into the dark forest once again.  After that experience, Faina began to warm up to Jack and Mabel.  She appears more often than she had before and starts to partake in the couple's daily activities, such as making bread with Mabel and tracking animals with Jack.  Although Faina becomes Jack and Mabel's child to some extent, she is never truly theirs - for she comes and goes like the wind and returns to the forest every night, without fail.  At this point, the story begins to laps over periods of time fairly quickly - changing from early winter to March in about 50 pages.  In these 50 pages, readers discover a bit about what Faina has been up to while she runs among the trees.  

One snowy day, while Jack was working in the field, Faina appears and asks Jack to follow her.  They run through the woods and up into the mountains for what seems like miles, stopping for only a moment at a small door on the side of a mountain which Jack assumes to be her home (this was very mysterious because Ivey chose to point out the door at this time but not elaborate on its purpose at all).  They ended their long trek atop a cliff where Faina uncovers a dead body in the snow that she claims is her 'papa'.  Naturally, this confused me a great deal because I was under the impression that Faina was created by Mabel and Jack out of snow - thus causing them to be the closest things to parents that she had.  However, I suspect that Ivey wanted the readers to be confused at this new revelation and her plan is working.  Anyway, Faina asks Jack to bury her papa and makes him promise not to tell anyone, even Mabel, about him.  Readers are not told why it must be kept a secret but we do know that it is of the highest importance that it must.  Jack agrees and later discovers the story of a Russian man called Swede.  He was a loner who traveled far into the mountains to hunt and search for gold, but was rarely seen by locals.  No one had seen him in a few years and George Benson assumed him to be dead.  Jack never mentions Faina or her papa to the locals in fear of being called crazy.  Yet Jack continues to worry about the girl and the burden of her dead papa on her young soul while he tries to figure out what he should do about it next. 

 While Jack struggles with the responsibility of the dead man, Mabel discovers some unsettling news of her own.  She recalls a book from her childhood that told a hauntingly similar tale to what her and Jack were experiencing currently.  The book, entitled The Snow Maiden, is about an old couple without any children that build a child out of snow and it magically comes to life.  (A coincidence? I think not...) Mabel believes that it might hold the key to their future with Faina.  However, when she receives the book in the mail from her sister, she discovers it was written in Russian and illegible to her.  Thankfully, her sister enclosed a letter in the package describing the tale.  She said that there were many versions of the tail.  All began the same and ended the same but the events within the versions were different.  Every tale began happily but ended in tragedy. One way or another the child disappeared forever - once by melting, once by murder, once by choice, and so on and so forth.  Mabel's fragile heart broke at this news, for she could not bare the thought of losing yet another child.  So she made it her mission to change the ending of her story and "choose joy over sorrow." (Ivey, 129)