Girl in Ice

January 1, 2022
When a girl frozen in ice at the Arctic Circle thaws out alive, an ancient Nordic languages specialist with troubles of her own is called to the scene. Ferencik--author of Into the Jungle (2019)--specializes in thrillers set in wilderness environments with female protagonists; her latest takes us to the land of subzero temperatures and wind-whipped polar landscapes. But bad weather is just the beginning of the unpleasantness Val Chesterfield encounters when she overcomes her many phobias to fly out and help climate scientist Wyatt Speeks with his perplexing specimen. The girl he chopped out of the wall of a crevasse and defrosted is terrified, violent, and unintelligible. While Wyatt is creepy on many levels, creepiest of all is his unwillingness to discuss the death by exposure of his erstwhile lab partner, Val's twin brother, Andy. Andy's having gotten locked out of the house overnight in his underwear has been presented as a suicide, but neither Val nor her father, also a climate scientist, believe it. Belief is a problem all through this book--the elements made up to serve the plot rest on a foundation of real climate science, linguistics, and cultural history but still don't manage to be convincing. The five characters--Val, Wyatt, a nasty cook, and a pair of married marine scientists--are also less than lifelike. Saddled with mental health issues and bad manners, their interactions range from rude to abusive except for the married couple, who are so in love it's nauseating. You really wouldn't want to be stuck in a room with these people, which poor Val is much of the time, and now someone has stolen her anxiety meds and hidden the booze! She finds herself becoming deeply attached to the mystery girl, but progress with communication is slow, and the girl's health takes a drastic turn for the worse. And then they all go outside and things get crazy. Tense, claustrophobic, and a bit hard to swallow.

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Starred review from January 17, 2022
Linguist Val Chesterfield, the narrator of this exemplary thriller from Ferencik (Into the Jungle), grapples with two mysteries—the apparent suicide of her twin brother, Andy, while on a research expedition in northern Greenland that included the discovery of an eight- or nine-year-old girl who was miraculously revived after being found frozen in a glacier. Despite her fears of travel, Val accepts an invitation from expedition leader Wyatt Speeks to travel to the Arctic to see whether she can decipher the child’s language, unknown even to the region’s indigenous people. Wyatt and his team are hoping the ice cores they’re studying can offer answers that could avert a climate disaster at a time when sudden, freezing storms are occurring with increasing frequency worldwide. Val’s moving struggles to communicate with the girl alternate with her investigation into Andy’s death, which she suspects was a homicide. Trenchant details about catastrophic climate change bolster a creative plot featuring authentic characters, particularly the anxious, flawed Val. Ferencik outdoes Michael Crichton in the convincing way she mixes emotion and science. Agent: Erin Harris, Folio Literary Management.

Starred review from December 1, 2021
Val Chesterfield has had a difficult life. Growing up without a mother, she always felt second-best to her twin, Andy. A passionate environmentalist, Andy killed himself at a remote research station in the Arctic, where he was working with his mentor, Wyatt Speeks. After Andy's death, Val, a gifted linguist, became even more tormented, depending on pills and alcohol to function. Then, out of the blue, she receives an email from Speeks saying he's made a shocking discovery: he's found a child, frozen in ice, and has thawed her out alive. However, when she speaks, it is in an unintelligible language. Speeks asks Val to come to the Arctic and see if she can understand the child. Val knows she will be far out of her comfort zone but is drawn to the Arctic not only to help the child, but also to see the place where Andy died. When she arrives, she finds the endless snow and ice terrifying, but when the child begins to respond to her, the situation becomes both more bearable and more frightening. The story evokes a palpable sense of foreboding and becomes increasingly ominous as it highlights the power of nature--and of human emotion. Original, intense, powerful, disturbing, and utterly mesmerizing, this one, which evokes Peter H�eg's Smilla's Sense of Snow, will stay with readers long after they've finished the book.

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