Ask a Bookseller: ‘Black Woods, Blue Sky’ by Eowyn Ivey 

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

Eowyn Ivey launched onto the literary scene in 2012 with her New York Times Bestselling debut “The Snow Child,” which grounds the fairy tale of a couple who makes a child out of snow in the hard reality of a 1920 Alaska homestead. Ivey weaves a world that feels both real and magical at the same time.

Thirteen years later, Ivey is out with her third novel “Black Woods, Blue Sky.” Olga Lijo Serans of Hearthside Books and Toys in Juneau, Alaska, says Ivey is “getting better and better at what she does.” 

The novel is marketed as a twist on Beauty and the Beast. Lijo Serans says a better comparison would be within Native Alaskan mythology. 

Set in contemporary Alaska, “Black Woods, Blue Sky” tells the story of a single mother, Birdie, who is struggling to make ends meet. She falls in love with a reclusive man and decides to join him, along with her daughter, in his isolated cabin in the mountains.

Theirs is a subsistence-living existence tied to nature, and at first Birdie finds it idyllic. But her partner has a secret. This could be the set-up of a horror novel, but while Lijo Serans describes the book as “raw” with thriller elements, the story goes in a different direction. 

Lijo Serans describes Ivey’s writing: 

“She’s totally grounded in the Alaska landscape and the Alaska way of life. But at the same time, she introduces an element of magic. The introduction is very slow. You sometimes aren’t really sure if the magic element is there or when it actually appeared. I found it totally engrossing, and I think that it’s just the thing to read on a winter night.”