Valley’s ‘Snow Child’ and best-selling author returns home

MAT-SU — After a whirlwind year of world travel with her first novel, the author of “The Snow Child” is home in the Mat-Su Valley to recharge and reconnect to the Alaska wilderness that inspires her.

Eowyn Ivey is back this month for the paperback release of “The Snow Child,” which was published in hardcover last February. The book spent more than six weeks on The New York Times Best Sellers list for fiction, as well as making best-seller lists in Norway and the United Kingdom.

“The Snow Child” has been nominated for several prestigious awards, including the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. It has also garnered critical acclaim. “The Snow Child” is based on a Russian fairy tale about an old man and woman who build a little girl out of snow and she comes to life.

Ivey will travel during December, with trips to the UK and New York City. The past several months have made a world traveler out of Ivey, who didn’t own a valid passport 14 months ago.

“It’s been quite a go,” Ivey said from her home between Chickaloon and Sutton. “It’s been very exciting.”

Ivey admits the book’s success has been a bit heady for a Palmer High graduate who grew up on Lazy Mountain without running water. She spent nine years as a reporter and editor for the Frontiersman before working as a bookseller at Fireside Books in Palmer.

Success has its rewards. For Ivey and her family, the very tangible reward for “The Snow Child’s” success is a water-well. The family had been hauling water since moving into their fixer upper in 2006.

“If all that came out of the book was the well, it would have been great,” Ivey said. “It’s amazing.”

Of course, that wasn’t the only benefit Ivey has accrued from writing an international bestseller. She and members of her family traveled to Australia, New Zealand, France, England and Scotland, as well as around the United States to promote her book and visit writers’ conferences.

That has given her daughters Aurora, a kindergartner, and Grace, an eighth-grader, opportunities about which they could have only dreamed, Ivey said.

Ivey said people have asked her if she could ever imagine the wild success of “The Snow Child.”

“I would have had to be delirious to imagine this,” Ivey said with a laugh. “I just wanted to make a living.”

Ivey said she expects the merry-go-round to slow as her first novel reaches its one-year anniversary date. Maybe then, she said, she can really concentrate on her second novel.

Like “The Snow Child,” it is set in Alaska of a bygone era. And like her first novel, it will contain some fantastical elements.

Ivey and her husband, Sam, Palmer area management biologist for the state Department of Fish and Game, made time for a caribou hunting trip this fall. That, she said, like chopping wood and feeding the chickens, is a tonic for her travel-weary and technology-swamped recent life.

“When we can, we seize our regular lives,” she said.

On her Facebook page, she posted frosty photos from the hunt, replete with grizzly tracks — the kind of scenes she describes in “The Snow Child,” and images with which her readers likely expect to be regaled in the next novel. It’s been difficult, she admits, to carve out the time to work on the novel, even with both of the girls in Palmer schools this year.

“I need to let go of this book (‘The Snow Child’) a little bit,” Ivey said. She said it is daunting to move beyond the success to strive for it anew with another project. She knows how unusual was the success of “The Snow Child.”

Before the release of the paperback in early November, the book had sold more than 100,000 copies in the United States. It is or will be sold in 30 countries in 20 translations, including Chinese simple characters and Chinese complex characters. The paperback’s release is expected to give the numbers another spike.

Even as Ivey tries to set aside “The Snow Child” to focus on her new tale, her debut novel continues to generate new opportunities and surprises.

A composer in the UK is writing an opera based on the story. It’s just another fantastic event surrounding the fantasy story, and while she calls the development “thrilling,” it makes Ivey laugh anew at the implausible incongruity.

“It’s hard to image Jack and Mabel (the homesteading couple who are central to her story) breaking out in song,” Ivey said.

“The Snow Child” is published by Little, Brown and Co.

Palmer author Eowyn Ivey will sign copies her international bestselling novel The Snow Child from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., Nov. 10 at Fireside Books in Palmer.

The novel, her first, was released in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company in February and will be released in paperback this week.