Okay, y’all. You know the drill.

BEA. Lots of ARCS. Seven in particular, transported via suitcase due to awesome factor. Sparkly pink unicorn. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Let’s cut right to the chase this time.

This is the seventh and final Suitcase Seven giveaway, and it’s a very special giveaway indeed — not just because it’s the last, but because of the book I’m giving away. This book is special. This book is magic. This book is quite possibly the best I’ve read all year.

What book is this, you ask?

The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey (pub date 2/1/12!).

From the ARC’s back cover:

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart — he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season’s first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone — but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees.

This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.

My Goodreads review:

This is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. I started it last night and couldn’t put it down until I finished it at 3:30 in the morning. It’s real, it’s wrenching, it’s raw and true and lovely in the best of ways. A haunting, heartbreaking fairy tale about love, longing, loss, magic, and the Alaskan wilderness, THE SNOW CHILD is a story timeless and out of time, and weaves an unbreakable spell. As someone else said, I had a feeling I knew where the story would take me, but I didn’t care, the telling of that story was so exquisitely powerful. One of the blurbs on the cover of my ARC describes it as the literary lovechild of Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Willa Cather. Dead-on. Perfectly crafted magical realism that will leave your heart aching in all the best ways.

You want this book. Ivey’s prose is pristine and romantic and mysterious and visceral, perfectly echoing the Alaskan wilderness it describes. The characters are real and true, and by the end of the novel, they are family. The Snow Child will leave you with one of those indelible aches that never really goes away. Truly remarkable books tend to do that — leave some of themselves within you, like a mark on the soul. I consumed this book in an evening, as I so rarely do. Usually, I can put a book down long enough to go to work, run errands, work on my latest novel.

But this book? No. I physically couldn’t bear to part with it until I’d finished.

Even right now, flipping through certain passages, I’m tearing up, remembering. The weight of the book in my hands is familiar and comforting. You know that sensation, when you pluck a treasured book off the shelf and read it for the hundredth time, just to recapture that initial feeling of wonder? It feels like coming home. I know without a doubt that The Snow Child will become one of those books for me, and I’m equally confident that many, many others will also discover its magic. If I had the resources to buy a copy for everyone I know, I would. As it is, shouting from the virtual rooftops about how much I love it will have to suffice.

*wipes eyes*

Seriously. This book gets me so emotional. I just…mailing this one out is gonna sting. Whoever wins, just know that my ARC will come to you smothered with love.

~*~

And now you’re tapping your foot and snapping your fingers in my face. “CLAIRE,” you say, “STOP BLUBBERING ALREADY AND TELL ME HOW TO WIN THIS.”

Okay, okay!

For a chance to win an ARC of The Snow Child, simply comment below!

You can earn additional entries by tweeting about this last Suitcase Seven giveaway (with hashtag #SuitcaseSeven for 1 additional entry) and/or blogging about it (for 2 additional entries). Simply copy and paste the link from your tweet and/or blog post in your comment below! You can earn a maximum of 4 entries. If you’ve won a previous Suitcase Seven giveaway, you cannot win again!

The Snow Child giveaway begins NOW, is open INTERNATIONALLY, and will end Thursday, September 15, at 12:00 p.m. CST. The winner will be announced later that day!

Have fun, and good luck! And excuse me while I go cuddle this book.