Book review: Eowyn Ivey returns with another superb novel inspired by fairy tales and real-life Alaska

“Black Woods, Blue Sky”

By Eowyn Ivey; Random House, 2025; 306 pages; $29.

Eowyn Ivey’s debut novel “The Snow Child,” in 2012, became an international bestseller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Based on a Russian folk tale but set on an Alaska homestead in the 1920s, that book combined a sense of magic with the real world of a wilderness homestead and the lives of an aging, childless couple. A second novel, “To the Bright Edge of the World,” followed four years later and is based on an 1885 expedition into Interior Alaska. Now, Ivey has returned to her fascination with fairy tales inspired, she has said, by “Beauty and the Beast” and “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” and set again in the landscape of “The Snow Child.”

Birdie, the young, restless, single mother of a 6-year-old, works at a roadhouse with a bar and cafe; her life so far has been chaotic and purposeless. After a night of partying, as she walks to the nearby creek to fish, she realizes that bears have left their dens and she’s forgotten her rifle. “She stood quietly in the dense brush, held her breath and listened. There was only birdsong and the creek, and farther away, the low, steady roar of the Wolverine River.” A noise in the alders alarms her, but it’s only a man she recognizes as the son of a neighbor. His scarred appearance, speech and behavior are all odd, but when in the following days he keeps coming to the cafe for tea and toast, she’s intrigued by him and begins a sort of friendship.

Birdie learns that the man, Arthur, spends time on the high ridge that she likes to watch; she has dreamt of escaping to that very spot in the mountains where she might feel more alive. When he brings her a clump of tundra from that place, “like he had ripped the moss and plants out of the ground with his bare hands,” and shows her daughter the tiny pink and white bell-flowers of kinnikinnick, she’s smitten.

The story proceeds in the alternating viewpoints of Birdie, daughter Emaleen, and Warren, the strange man’s father. They and all the peripheral characters in and around the rural community are fully drawn, as familiar as any we might meet in real-life Alaska. Even Arthur, although we never enter his point of view, is endowed with a richness of perspective and a complex personality.

Bears frequent the area, and the roadhouse regulars love to share their stories of close encounters and, sometimes, bad outcomes. “Part of the fun was frightening the wide-eyed tourists who might overhear, but in truth, you were an idiot to not be somewhat afraid.”

One neighbor, a quoter of Proust and Margaret Atwood, lectures Birdie about the names many traditional cultures have applied to bears out of fear or respect. “Barefoot wanderer. Four-legged man. Golden friend. Honey-eater. A dark thing ... All over the world, all down through the ages, we’ve come up with these secret names.”

Of all the characters, none is more compelling than the child. Emaleen enjoys an abundantly imaginative life, accompanied by her own special fairy friend. Clear-eyed and curious as well as imaginative, she is early to understand the truth of Arthur and to accept him just as he is.

One great strength of “Black Woods, Blue Sky” is Ivey’s rendering of both the natural and magical worlds that Emaleen inhabits without distinctions between them. While her mother can be limited in awareness, Emaleen is sharply observant within the liminal world. In one scene she builds “cakes” of layered stones, with a frosting of mud and spruce needles, and then decorates them with blossoms. “It was like they were hidden before, the wildflowers, but now that Arthur had taught her their names, they jumped out of the meadow at her. Bluebell. Geranium. Arctic rose. Star flower. When she picked one and said its name and looked at it closely, it was like a spell.”

Aside from fairy tales about beasts turning into princes and involving difficult quests, Ivey would know of the many versions of Alaska Native stories that include shape-shifting between animals and humans. The lives of “others” who we might fear, try to destroy, or come to love seems to be a universal draw for storytellers everywhere and in every time. Ivey has built on this tradition with a very modern, very Alaskan take. Her inspiration may have come from source stories, but “Black Woods, Blue Sky” is an original work of art that only Ivey’s imaginative powers, deep knowledge of Alaska and its beings, and commitment to depicting the real, loving, and often confused lives of her characters could create.

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