How long does it take to read The Snow Child?
A Novel
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey takes about 7 hours 8 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 7 hours 8 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2012. 389 pages, about 106,975 words.
15 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 11 hours 53 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 7 hours 8 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 27 minutes |
The page count is the median across 2 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
A couple's lives are changed forever by the arrival of a little girl, wild and secretive, on their snowy doorstep. Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart—he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone—but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.
Subjects: fiction, fairy tales, frontier and pioneer life, adaptations, history, magic realism
