“All her life she had believed in something more, in the mystery that shape-shifted at the edge of her senses. It was the flutter of moth wings on glass and the promise of river nymphs in the dappled creek beds.”

Mabel reveals her need to believe in something greater and more magical than the world around her. She needs fantasy. Even before she meets Faina, she shows how desperately she needs to escape her unpromising, unspectacular, harsh world of loss, anxiety, isolation, and heartache.

“Was that why they had come north—to build a life? Or did fear drive her? Fear of the gray, not just in the strands of her hair and her wilting cheeks, but the gray that ran deeper, to the bone, so that she thought she might turn into a fine dust and simply sift away in the wind.”

Mabel questions her motive for relocating to the Alaskan wilderness. She acknowledges that she had hoped to find a world without the distracting noises of families to avoid thinking about her stillborn child. But the strategy is not working. Here she indicates how she feels like she is disappearing, like her entire identity is hissing away in the gray vastness of the territory.

“‘She’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think? She’s beautiful.’”

In Mabel’s too-enthusiastic reaction to the snow child she and Jack built, her emotional response takes a dramatic turn away from reality and into fairy-tale fantasy. The pile of snow is already anthropomorphized—and “it” becomes a “she.” Indeed, in repeating the word “beautiful,” which by itself seems out of place when used to describe a pile of snow, Mabel reveals how she is trying to convince not only Jack but also herself of the lifeless snow sculpture’s beauty.