In the brutal bone-freezing cold of the Arctic Circle on a remote island off Greenland, a young girl has thawed from the ice, and she is alive. A miracle? Yes, but no one can understand what she is trying to say, and she acts scared of everyone. Val, a trained linguist, is one of the few who understand the dead Nordic languages. So she is contacted by the researchers already there to come and work with this girl.
Val’s twin brother, Andy, an accomplished climate scientist, supposedly committed suicide while at the very place in the Arctic Circle that Val is going. But how did he really die? Val doesn’t believe that Andy would’ve ever killed himself.
Val has a tough time making the choice to go though. She definitely wants to work with this miracle girl and help her. How long had she been frozen? Why was she able come back to life? To live and breathe again? But she has some major issues like relying on drugs and alcohol to make it through most days. Her desire to find out what really happened to Andy and to work with this once frozen girl wins out, so she decides to make the trip and packs a bunch of her meds to take with her.
The Arctic Circle turns out to be a pretty depressing place to live for any length of time. All the people there, including Val, sure aren’t there for enjoyment. Some of them have pasts that are pretty lame; others have pasts that make them dangerous.
Sigrid, the ice girl, loves to eat raw meat, and she uses only her hands. And amazingly, this young girl has the ability to call to narwhals. But she is understandably more than a bit antisocial. It takes Val longer than she anticipated to win her trust. But once she does, the things she begins to learn amaze her. When Sigrid becomes deathly ill, Val is in a race to discover how to save her, and she uncovers secrets that puts her life in danger as well as Sigrid’s.
The book was already captivating, but it now became so intense that I couldn’t put it down for even a moment. In the bitter relentless cold of the Arctic, Val and Sigrid are running for their lives. I found the ending to be in no way disappointing and thought the story came to a logical and satisfying conclusion.
I was sent an Advance Reader’s Edition of this book by Simon & Schuster in exchange for an honest review. If you would like your own copy of this unputdownable book, I’ve provided an Amazon link for you below.
Amazon Link: Girl in Ice
Favorite Sentences:
Note: These sentences were taken from an uncorrected proof but were still so awesome that I thought they deserved to be shared. They may read differently in the final copy or might have even been deleted from the book.
The truth was, I’d never embarked into the field anyplace more frightening than a local graveyard to suss out a bit of Old English carved into a crumbling stone marker.
I pictured the ancient crypt where the original text had been found, the bones of the poet lying nearby ground to dust by time, his passions, musings, longings now my task to reveal.
Wide set and gray, her eyes contained an emptiness that chilled me, a toxic agony that echoed my own.
Thunderous crashes of icebergs calving in the bay—Wyatt called it Arctic white noise—rendered me jittery and anxious.
New Words Learned:
The following words appeared in the uncorrected proof and may or may not be in the final version of the book.
bantam – pertly combative
bora – a violent cold northerly wind of the Adriatic
calving – of an ice mass: to separate or break so that a part becomes detached
derecho – a large fast-moving complex of thunderstorms with powerful straight-line winds that cause widespread destruction
desultory – marked by lack of definite plan, regularity, or purpose
enigma – a person of puzzling or contradictory character
ersatz – serving as a substitute; synthetic; artificial
gloaming – twilight; dusk
grokked – to understand profoundly and intuitively
inchoate – not yet completed or fully developed; rudimentary
joinery – fine woodwork
misanthrope – a person who hates, dislikes, or distrusts most others; an antisocial, cynical, or unfriendly person
moraine – an accumulation of earth and stones carried and finally deposited by a glacier
Oroshi – the Japanese term for a wind blowing strong down the slope of a mountain, occasionally as strong gusts of wind which can cause damage
pare – to reduce or remove by or as by cutting; diminish or decrease gradually (often followed by down)
piteraq – a cold katabatic wind which originates on the Greenlandic icecap and sweeps down the east coast. The word “piteraq” means “that which attacks you” in the local language. Piteraqs are most common in the autumn and winter. Wind speeds typically reach 50 to 80 m/s (180–288 km/h; 111–178 mph). On February 6, 1970 the community of Taslilaq was hit by the worst documented piteraq ever in Greenland (estimated at 90 m/s — about 325 km/h or 200 mph) causing severe damage. Since the beginning of 1970 special piteraq warnings are issued by the Danish Meteorological Institute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piteraq
williwaw – a violent squall that blows in near-polar latitudes, as in the Strait of Magellan, Alaska, and the Aleutian Islands
About the Author:
Erica Ferencik is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Boston University. Her work has appeared in Salon and The Boston Globe, as well as on National Public Radio. Find out more on her website EricaFerencik.com and follow her on Twitter @EricaFerencik.
