Review: Girl in Ice

Girl in Ice by Erica Ferencik
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

3.5 stars 

I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. 

Anxiety: the crippling kind. I'm tethered to the familiar, the safe, or what I perceive as safe. 

Girl in Ice was a mystery, thriller, and touch of scifi story that took an intriguing idea but didn't completely deliver on all of its executions. Told in first person from Val, a linguist who has anxiety that keeps her from deviating from the known, she eats the same meals, can't bring herself to travel to new places, and lost her twin brother to suicide five months ago. She receives a phone call from her brother's mentor who he had been studying climate change with on a small uninhabited island off Greenland's northwest coast, Wyatt claims he found a young girl frozen in the ice and she has miraculously thawed out alive and is frantically speaking a language that no one can understand. Wyatt wants Val to put her linguistic genius to use and help him figure out what the girl is saying. Val's anxiety makes it nearly impossible for her to travel but she never believed the story of her brother's suicide and her father is pressuring her to go to the Arctic Circle to find out the truth of what really happened. 

What is she saying, what does she want, what has happened to her? 

The Arctic Circle setting with it's isolation helps to add a sense of eerie and helplessness and the small cast of characters, Val, Wyatt, the brusque mechanic Jeanne, the married couple scientists, and the girl found in the ice, Sigrid, narrow the focus and add to the thriller feel of urgency for Val to figure out what is going on before it's too late. The story was a bit bottom heavy with the slower creeping of Val arriving in the Arctic Circle, introduction of characters, very gradual growing of understanding between Val and Sigrid, and then the rush to understanding and some reveals in the last 20%. That very ending rush left some answers in its wake, the scifi component and some of the mystery but left others missing, like the ultimate answer about some deaths. The author almost gave too much backstory to some characters because their inclusion left some threads dangling. I also was a little disappointed in how Jeanne's character was utilized and the ending. 

To be encased in this glacial prison, eyes frozen open in terror, how long had she been like that? 

The use of a very real crisis, climate change, and then adding in some danger of ice winds (a changing of temperature so quick it instantly freezes people) and then adding in the scifi-ish elements made this story's basics intriguing but the rushing in the ending gave this more of a deflated balloon feeling. Some side stories and secondary characterizations ending up not feeling needed because of how they weren't wrapped up, not puzzle piece explained, and ultimately felt needed to be edited out. However, there were some memorable scenes, like the mass grave site of flash frozen people caught in mid-battle, and the mystery/thriller feeling of dread is definitely felt in the middle with questions of is Val's anxiety the culprit or is she really in danger. If looking for a touch of scifi in your mystery and thriller reading, this would provide an easy afternoon chilling read.

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