By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: Erica Ferenick’s Girl in Ice is on the surface a tense claustrophobic science thriller about a small group of researchers studying an abandoned child at a remote island in Greenland. But in actuality it is a warm tender story about a woman losing one family and gaining another with a lonely abandoned girl.
Val Chesterfield is a linguist that specializes in dead Nordic languages. She is grieving the death of her brother, Andy, a climate scientist who was believed to have committed suicide during an assignment in remote Greenland. Wyatt, Andy's colleague, recruits Val’s help because his crew thawed a girl found in the ice.
They can't understand what she is saying so they need a cunning linguist (Yes, I said it and no I don't regret it). Val sets aside her fears and anxiety to communicate and bond with the girl, Sigrid and also to investigate her brother's death which looks less like suicide and more like murder.
As anyone who has seen The Thing can testify, a remote frozen research outpost surrounded by barren snow and ice is an ideal location for a paranoid Science Fiction or Thriller in which the protagonists are surrounded by suspicions that the people working with them are not what they seem. That The Thing is set in Antarctica and Girl in Ice in Arctic Greenland is irrelevant.
Ferenick captures the Arctic setting as one in which the elements themselves can be threatening. The science outpost is entirely surrounded by freezing temperatures, cold white barren lands, gray skies, and endless unchanging lands. Villages take a day or two to reach if hypothermia doesn't set in on the way over. Communication with the outside is minimal so if an emergency hits, you are pretty much SOL.
It’s all too easy for claustrophobia, paranoia, and anxiety to develop. Those people that you work with every day for research or to make interesting discoveries could be working for someone else. They might have ulterior motives and an intense dislike for the people that they are working with.
What about that dislike? What's to stop a minor argument becoming extremely heated or worse somebody with long term mental disorders or with psychopathic symptoms doing away with somebody and taking full advantage of the isolation to get away with it.
For a person like Val who is very brilliant, very dedicated in her field, and very troubled, it doesn't take long for her to cast suspicions on the people around her and the circumstances of her brother's death.
Despite the setting, this is a story of two characters who are out of their element physically and emotionally and form a surrogate family in the isolation and desolation.
Val is physically out of her element because of the location but also her own mindset. She has many anxieties and phobias that are only emphasized by the isolation that she finds in Greenland. She is similar to Louise Banks (Amy Adams) from one of my favorite movies, Arrival. Both are highly intelligent women with vast knowledge of linguistics, but have difficulties communicating with other people on a social basis.
In fact Val's main emotional touchstone was with her brother, Andy. Andy was a contrast, an idealistic individual who was motivated by climate change activism. After he died, Val remained closed off and isolated. She only emotionally committed to the bare minimum in life particularly in her relationship with her grief stricken father. The Arctic landscape is a metaphor for her cold nature.
Sigrid eventually becomes another touchstone for Val. Like Val, Sigrid is also closed off. She was frozen and thawed, so she is centuries removed from her time. There are some scientific implausibilities of this actually working. Thankfully, they can be overlooked for the setting, characters, and overall plot.
The focus is not on Sigrid essentially traveling through time nor the scientific process of waking her up. It's about a girl who is separated from her blood family, culture, tribe, even her language. She is among strangers in every sense of the word. Of the isolated characters, Sigrid is the most isolated of all.
Val and Sigrid’s communication sessions build a bridge between them. The cold isolation is tempered by the warm developing mother-daughter relationship between them. The relationship is what thaws the isolation and makes the truth come forward about Andy's fate, the scientist’s real goals, and Val and Sigrid’s affection for each other.
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