Vocabulary in Use Intermediate by Michael McCarthy

Mabel “had imagined the two of them working in green fields framed by mountains as tall and snowy as the Swiss Alps,” but after two years, the isolation and darkness are too much. The novel opens with a scene of chilly silence: It’s 1920, and Mabel and Jack have fled the civilized world of Pennsylvania to homestead 160 acres in Alaska Territory. That’s essentially what happens in Eowyn Ivey’s “The Snow Child,” but the author has transported the story to her native Alaska and fleshed it out with an endearing set of characters.Įlements of this story make sentimentality as tempting as a witch’s gingerbread house, but Ivey never strays far from the original’s underlying sadness. You may remember “The Little Daughter of the Snow” from Arthur Ransome’s “Old Peter’s Russian Tales.” A childless couple forms a girl from snow and, in answer to their longing, she comes to life. How delightful then to find this lovely first novel inspired by a Russian folk tale. (My, what big sales you have!) But it’s a difficult act of wizardry: One wrong spell and you’re cast out of the kingdom of literary fiction or, worse, left suspended between YA and adult fiction, too hot for one group, too cold for the other. Byatt and Margaret Atwood to Aimee Bender and Neil Gaiman.

Children, of course, know this, even as they’re gently redirected into the sanitized happily ever after.įortunately, there are still fine writers willing to venture into the dark forest of fairy tales, from A.S. Those authentic stories scratch anxieties and longings deep within us. Long before Julia Roberts made prostitution look so romantic and Disney sauteed the Little Mermaid in marshmallow fluff, fairy tales were full of unsettling transformations and traumatic bargains. Only the tragically misinformed would ever sigh over the night’s first star and wish for a real fairy-tale ending.

Vocabulary in Use Intermediate by Michael McCarthy