Girl in Ice
By Erica Ferencik
Scout Press, 2022

Girl in Ice, the new book from The River at Night author Eric Ferencik, stars a young linguist named Val Chesterfield, who’s still reeling from the apparent suicide of her twin brother Andy, alleged to have taken his own life in the sub-zero weather of the Greenland coast. Val has never quite believed that her passionate, dedicated brother would take his own life, so she has a hidden motive when she heeds the call of Andy’s former research colleague Wyatt Speeks, asking her to travel to Greenland in order to help him make sense of what might be the most stunning scientific discovery of the century: a young girl, miraculously thawed out of the ice that’s apparently held her for centuries. 

The little girl is speaking a language nobody understands, and she seems to be both ailing and yearning for her long-lost family. Despite herself, Val is both intrigued and sympathetic, which, we must assume, is what blinds her – and only her, as every one of the book’s screaming readers will be able to attest – to the nuclear-obvious fact that Wyatt is a lip-curling, mirror-preening, hair-pomading, puppy-microwaving, scene-monologuing, due-paying, card-carrying James Bond villain of such cartoonish proportions that when Greenland customs officials disinterestedly asked him what his reason was for visiting the country, he probably raised a fist to the sky and said, “Evil, my good man! EEEEEEEvil!” 

Val is grief-stricken and discombobulated, so she somehow misses this, despite the fact that Wyatt is forever dropping ominously ambiguous hints (and despite the fact that he’s gone to the extra effort of having a Frau Farbissina-style scary female henchperson lurking around, waiting for her moment of holding the heroine at gunpoint in the third act). Instead, Val examines and quickly bonds with the mysterious little girl, and Ferencik manages this part of her story fairly effectively. It’s an old and familiar thrill-riff, this business of raising the possibility that a person could survive in icy suspended animation, and Ferencik energetically captures the feeling of wonder felt by her core cast at encountering such a thing. 

Readers looking to enjoy the fuzzy familiarity of this defrosting-enigma gambit will need to pay a predictable price for it when wading through Girl in Ice, unfortunately: they get the human popsicles, yes, but they also get prose that reads like it was defrosted from freshman writing student’s most purple cast-offs. Things “chilled my blood,” Val tells us; sometimes she “meant business;” “dread coursed through me,” she mentions; “Her body rotated with dream-slowness once, twice, before she began to fade into cerulean depths …” 

Too much of this kind of bilge will make almost any reader want to fade into the cerulean depths, but Val’s the stubborn type, particularly once she finally starts to suspect that she might have accidentally accepted an invitation to join the Red Skull and his not-at-all-psycopathic henchperson in an icebound wasteland far from reliable cell service. By the time she’s up to her shinbones in ice eels, she’ll be fighting for her life – and readers who can suppress the occasional giggle will doubtless be enjoying themselves.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.