Review: 'Black Woods, Blue Sky'
Black Woods, Blue Sky
By Eowyn Ivey
Magic Realism
Random House
February 2025
Eowyn Ivey's last novel, The Snow Child, was an Alaska-set retelling of a magical fairy tale in which love proved strong.
The same can be said of her latest novel, Black Woods, Blue Sky.
Birdie has been a free spirit who loves her six-year-old daughter, Emaleen. She tries not to feel tied down being a single mother, and usually succeeds. Arthur is the strangely quiet young man who seems to live up in the mountains on the other side of the river. But sometimes he comes to town.
He has started coming into the lodge restaurant where Birdie works, asking for tea and toast. Arthur doesn't talk much. He hasn't since Warren found him in the woods with a bear pelt seemingly attached to parts of his body and a mother Grizzly with a cub nearby. Warren's late wife, Carol, loved and cared for Arthur even more fiercely than their own daughters, making sure Arthur knew what he needed to get by in society. Even though he spends most of his time in the woods.
Birdie takes a liking to him. So does her daughter. Birdie longs for something different than her dead-end waitress job, and fighting the temptations of liquor and bad choices in men. Arthur, who tries to explain his mind functions as if he was in the past, present and future all at once, falls in love with Birdie. He offers to take Birdie and Emaleen to his remote cabin, which once Warren and Carol built in their younger days.
In this version of a tale as old as time, the ways in which Arthur, Birdie and Emaleen find ways to communicate with each other and become attached to each other fit their characters. But what is Arthur, or what did something make him to be? And what will happen when winter comes?
Then again, there is the truth that Warren knows:
Love is the most powerful force in the world. If you couldn't put your hope in that, what was the point of anything.
Or as a learned friend tells Birdie, quoting Proust, that he hopes she always sees blue sky above her, even when the woods are dark and black.
Throughout the novel, each character's love and appreciation for the Alaskan wilderness is a light into their pure hearts. The descriptions are as lovely as the sun shining on a fish jumping out of the river or a rain drop glistening on a newly opened blossom.
When the story begins, Birdie goes out early one morning to do a little fishing at the river. Just being out there feels good to her.
She knew she might be fishing an empty hole, but it didn't matter. It was enough to be out here, to let the sunlight and the green of the forest, the sound of the creek and the summer birdsong, wash over her.
That kind of love is felt and seen throughout the novel. It is as magical as the story of Arthur, Birdie and Emaleen.