If the way Mabel and Jack shape a child from snow—and the tender ambiguity around Faina—made your heart ache, you’ll love how Once Upon a River opens with a drowned girl who inexplicably lives again. The novel circles a riverside inn of storytellers, shifting gently between possibility and realism as families marked by loss vie to claim the child. Like Faina’s fox-shadowed wanderings, the Thames and its villages feel enchanted without ever breaking the spell of real life.

Drawn to the Snow Maiden threads behind Faina? Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale spins Russian folktales into a frost-bright world where a girl named Vasya can see the household spirits others deny. As in The Snow Child, winter isn’t just weather—it’s presence and pressure. The story balances hearthside tenderness with the wild danger of the forest, echoing the way Faina slips between homestead and wilderness, always a little beyond certainty.

If the grind of breaking ground, tracking seasons, and weathering isolation in 1970s Alaska resonated when Mabel and Jack worked their homestead, The Great Alone captures that same vast, perilous beauty. Leni’s family learns the hard math of moose hunts, cabin repairs, and the long dark—along with the ways a close-knit community can be both lifeline and threat. You’ll feel the land press in just as it does around Jack’s traplines and Faina’s snow-bright trails.

If you loved how The Snow Child unfolds slowly—from grieving silence to the fragile trust Faina builds with Jack and Mabel—The Orchardist offers the same measured bloom. Talmadge, a solitary fruit grower in early-1900s Washington, shelters two runaway sisters, and over seasons of pruning and harvest, a found family takes root. The emotional crescendos arrive like first thaw: understated, inevitable, and deeply felt.

If the intimate isolation of Jack and Mabel’s cabin—and the way silence can crowd a room—stayed with you, Sweetland narrows the lens even further. Moses Sweetland remains on his Newfoundland island after everyone else leaves, living with storms, seals, and the half-seen company of the past. Its quiet, wintry haunt carries the same hush as Faina’s footfalls across fresh snow.