Girl in Ice by Erica Ferenick; Arctic Scientific Thriller Is At Heart a Warm Mother-Daughter Story

 

Girl in Ice by Erica Ferenick; Arctic Scientific Thriller Is At Heart a Warm Mother-Daughter Story

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.

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. 

New Book Alert: Colony by Benjamin Cross; Suspenseful But Flawed Science Thriller Recalls '90's Adventure Novels and Movies

 

New Book Alert: Colony by Benjamin Cross; Suspenseful But Flawed Science Thriller Recalls '90's Adventure Novels and Movies

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: Benjamin Cross' Colony is a book that is similar to its premise. The plot involves a group of scientists stranded in the Arctic that encounter a herd of prehistoric creatures that have evolved and adapted to their surroundings and are not so happy about being interrupted by some aggravating humans. Like the prehistoric creatures, Colony itself is practically an artifact from another time though a lot more recent.

Colony is similar to the science novels and blockbuster films of the 1990's, works of people like Michael Crichton or Robin Cook. Like Colony, they involve plucky scientists, usually American, British, or from various countries, who speak a lot of technobabble and have strange theories that are proven right by the end. They always face some sort of scientific threat of monsters, viruses, or natural disasters. There is some sort of family dilemma, perhaps a divorce, to give a personal conflict alongside the scientific one.

The scientists are surrounded by bureaucrats, scientific rivals, or representatives from another country who try to stop their research and either run afoul of or try to control the natural threat on their own. Oh and expect a betrayal that proves that humanity is the real destructive force.

It's exciting, suspenseful, and predictable. But there is a bit of nostalgia involved in a book that allows you to lose yourself in an adventure that hearkens back to an earlier time.

Callum Ross, a divorced Professor of Archeology, is spending some rare vacation time with his son, Jamie, when his boss, Jonas Olsen requests him to join an expedition to Franz Josef Land in the Arctic of Northern Russia. He is assigned to a group of scientists conducting a field survey on the recently found Harmsworth Island for the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental department that encourages cooperation within countries over the Arctic's vast resources. Of course Jamie agrees, meets the scientists, encounters prehistoric creatures, gets betrayed etc.

The protagonists are the usual mixed bag in this kind of book.  Besides Callum, there's Dan Peterson, an American New Age surfer dude who calls Callum "Indiana McJones" and is usually the comic relief. There's Lungkaju, the Nganasan guide with a personal connection to the local area. Dr. Semyanov, the father figure of the group. Then there are the female scientists Ava Lee, Canadian vertebrate paleontologist and Darya Lebedev, Russian ecologist. They are there as visual proof that science is not a male dominated field. However, they contribute very little to the plot except to look amazed,, occasionally use scientific jargon to prove that yes they are scientists, get injured and be at the point of death quite often, and become the love interests of Dan and Callum respectively. Like I said, Colony is a book invoking an earlier time. Unfortunately, the attention to female characters seems to also hearken back to that earlier time as well. The better characters are in fact the male characters.

There are some interesting scenes that develop the characters as they get to know each other. There are some cute flirty nerdy passages as Darya and Callum and then Ava and Dan share their um research with each other. There is also a particularly touching moment when Callum has a teleconference with a very disappointed Jamie and has a heart to heart with a seemingly gruff Russian comms assistant that gives him some surprisingly warm parental advice.

There is also a beautiful chapter in which Callum and Darya leave the compound to observe narwhals in action that acknowledges the beauty of nature. (Of course it's a lot less beautiful to read when in reality the United States is under a polar vortex.) Then there are the moments in which the antagonists plot with the traitor who becomes pretty obvious long before they are revealed. 

Of course these are mere distractions once the real stars of the show, the creatures, arrive.

The creatures are described as lizard birds and though that name sounds cheesy,the execution is less so. They are bipedal with feathers covering their skin, tiny forearms, tails, and long beak like snouts. Their large teeth, claws, and carnivorous diet, particularly for human flesh reveal that they mean business. They are adaptable to their surroundings as their eyes adjust to the sunlight or lack thereof and make use of the extensive caves as shelters. Their intelligence shows in their ability to learn from and hunt their human adversaries. 

Filmmakers would have a field day visualizing the attacks on the hapless scientists that have entered their territory. 

The stand offs are pretty suspenseful as Callum et al. have to face not only the reptilian but mammalian antagonists as the villains make their plans known. The action is non-stop and frequent, abandoning any semblance of development for high octane thrills and suspense.

If you are looking for a deep theme or characters, look elsewhere. Colony knows what it is and it delivers. It is an action packed science novel that is frozen in time as much as the lizard birds. However, upon reawakening, it proves to be an exciting and entertaining romp.