The Snow Child (Eowyn Ivey)

This lovely story of a childless couple making their way on a homestead in Alaska in the 1920s features poetic language, delightful characters, and a gripping sense of the wild, cruel beauty of the place. It also straddles the line between reality and magic in a way my prosaic soul had some trouble with. The main characters basically fled to the Alaskan wilderness to escape their grief after their only child was stillborn, but found that they had brought the grief with them into a land that was unforgiving and harsh. In a rare moment of frivolity they built a little girl out of snow and gave her a coat, mittens, and a scarf. The next day the snow and the clothes are gone, and there are only footsteps leading away into the woods. After that the girl become more and more real. I kept alternating between believing the child they saw was a real girl living by her wits and believing she was some kind of spirit of the wilderness; perhaps she was both. Regardless of my unease with this dichotomy, I still loved the story and the people.

Arctic Rising (Tobias Buckell)

The plot of this story was interesting and kept me turning pages. In the fairly near future, global warming has melted the ice caps and opened the entire arctic circle to settlement and shipping. Lots of groups are exploring and exploiting this region, including those who want to do things like dump various waste products. The UN has airships in the area watching for this, but one gets shot down, and its pilot barely survives. She finds herself hunted and threatened, and is nearly killed several more times as she tries to unravel the mystery of what's going on at the pole. With the help of various shady characters, she uncovers a nest of competing conspiracies between those fighting to save the world from ecological disaster and those who just want to exploit it, and it turns out that neither of these is really the good guy. Things are very exciting, but none of the characters ever felt very real to me, partly because the dialogue never rang true. A good thriller, though.