Girl In Ice

 

Girl In Ice by Erica Ferencik 320 pages

 

As the heat turns up in St. Louis, I always try to find a book that is set somewhere cold. Well, you can’t get much colder than the research facility, Tarrarmiut Artic Science Station, off the coast of Greenland. The temperature and wind chill are so cold, they don’t register on thermometers. There are five other people living and working there, well at least until five months ago.

 

That is when Andy Chesterfield walked outside in the middle of the night in nothing but his boxers and froze to death. How could that have happened? His twin sister, linguist professor Val, is skeptical,

 

Val, an expert in dead Nordic languages, receives an email from the lead scientist, Wyatt, to the research station asking her to come and help him identify the unknown language a girl found frozen beneath the frozen landscape speaks. Unfortunately, Val (as had Andy) suffers from crippling anxiety that prevents her from hopping on the next plane bound for Greenland. It takes her ninety-nine-year-old father and a large dose of her anxiety pills to convince her to help Wyatt and search for indications that Andy did not kill himself.

 

Wyatt, Andy and the two other scientists believe the girl they found and slowly, slowly, slowly thawing out is about seven hundred years old. How she got there and how she is as much a mystery as her guttural speech.

 

When the girl thaws out, she is alive. Scared and confused, the young girl lashes out at anyone who comes near her. After the thaw, Wyatt insists that Val be the only one to have contact with her. The two develop a bond, and Val learns that her name is Sigrid. But that is the only word Val can understand. Sigrid speaks in a language Val has never heard.

 

Val does get Sigrid to draw pictures, but she draws the same scene over and over. No one can figure out what they mean. But Val is about to find out. When Sigrid gets sick, no one at the facility knows what is wrong? Could it be the food they eat? Could she be dying?

 

Ferencik draws beautiful pictures of the landscape, so cold and so beautiful I needed a sweater in the 90+ degree weather. The tension throughout the story runs high and low. Girl In Ice receives 4 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.