Into this native timelessness blunder the Europeans, and they have their eye on the clock. A shaman is said to shapeshift into a raven a young woman believes her husband becomes a river otter a spruce tree brings forth a human baby. There, the party encounters native tribes who see no clear boundaries between the animal and human worlds. The US government has launched a Lewis and Clark-style military expedition to explore the upper reaches of the wild Wolverine River. Yet Ivey manages to imbue this faux-documentary exposition with a prickly tension, a thrumming suspense shot through with foreboding.
Like the modern-day museum archivist who is sent the parcel of materials by the explorer’s descendant, we work through the pages, searching for illuminating connections. Through journal entries, military reports, letters and documents, Ivey lays down her story in shards, requiring the reader to piece together the final narrative.
Her second novel, To the Bright Edge of the World, is again set in Alaska but in 1885, a few decades earlier than the previous book: this is an era of explorers and prospectors rather than hardscrabble homesteaders. Like the couple in her first novel, The Snow Child, who build an icy model of a little girl that magically transforms into a living child, Ivey fashions characters who come to warm and vivid life against her frozen Alaskan landscapes. E owyn Ivey is a deft craftswoman, attentive to the shape and heft of her sentences.
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