Book Review: Girl In Ice

Synopsis:

Valerie “Val” Chesterfield is a linguist trained in the most esoteric of disciplines: dead Nordic languages. Despite her successful career, she leads a secluded life and languishes in the shadow of her twin brother, Andy, an accomplished climate scientist stationed on a remote island off Greenland’s barren coast. But Andy is gone. He took his own life five months ago having willfully ventured unprotected into 50 degree below zero weather. Val is inconsolable — and disbelieving. She suspects foul play.

Wyatt, Andy’s mentor and fellow researcher in the Arctic, discovers a scientific impossibility – a young girl frozen in the ice who he manages to thaw out alive. She is speaking a language no one understands. Val is his first call. He asks her to travel to the frozen North to meet the girl and try to comprehend what she is so passionately trying to communicate. Under the auspices of helping Wyatt interpret the girl’s speech, Val is determined to overcome her phobias. She musters every ounce of courage she can summon, and journeys to the Arctic to attempt to understand what the girl is saying . . . and solve the mystery of her brother’s death.

The moment she steps off the plane, her fears threaten to overwhelm her. The landscape is fierce and unforgiving. Wyatt is a brilliant but difficult enigma.

The girl is special, and Val’s connection to her is profound. But something is terribly wrong; the child is sick, possibly dying. The key to saving her lies in discovering the truth about Wyatt’s research. Can his data be trusted? And does it have anything to do with how and why Andy died?

With time running out, Val embarks on an incredible frozen odyssey — led by the unlikeliest of guides — to rescue the new family she has found in the most unexpected of places.

Review:

Author Erica Ferencik was raised in upstate New York and earned a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Boston University. She considers that milestone “just the beginning of her literary education.” Over the course of the past thirty-five years, she has penned novels, short stories, essays, and screenplays, and labored as a ghostwriter. She spent ten years performing stand-up and sketch comedy, and dabbled in filmmaking. These days she lives in Boston with her husband and enormous Maine Coon cat, but there is literally nowhere she is unwilling to go in order to conduct research. The River at Night, her first published book, found her navigating the remote forests of the Allagash Territory in Northern Maine. For her next novel, Into the Jungle, she rafted down the Amazon River in the Peruvian jungle. The fjords of Greenland were her destination for Girl In Ice, because she is committed to infusing her stories with “the real sights, sounds, smells, the real feels of a place . . . My passion is to create unputdownable novels set in some of the most inhospitable regions on earth, places most of us don’t get a chance to experience in person in our lifetimes.”

Inspiration for the book struck in the winter of 2018 as Ferencik wandered the woods behind her home and saw three turtles frozen in the pond, mid-stroke. They appeared neither alive nor dead. She was so fascinated by them that she began searching Google to learn what species can freeze and thaw out alive. She found out that a surprising number, including caterpillars, wood frogs, beetles, and crocodiles, have that capability, thanks to a certain cryoprotein that protects them. Obviously, human beings have not mastered it yet, although embryos can be frozen.

In her imagination, she envisioned a girl’s foot, frozen in place as the girl was running. She pondered what she was running from. And thought she might have a story and a character about which readers would care. The journey to publication took four years and the aforementioned research in Greenland.

The result is Girl In Ice, set at the extremely remote Tarrarmiut Arctic Science Station, a research facility off the coast of Greenland. At that very venue, linguist and professor Val Chesterfield’s twin brother, Andy, allegedly committed suicide five months earlier by walking outside in the dead of night wearing only his boxer shorts and freezing to death. What would cause Andy to take his life in that manner? Val and her brother have been deeply troubled not about Andy’s death, and skeptical of the reported circumstances surrounding his demise.

Val receives an email from Wyatt Speek, Andy’s mentor and fellow researcher, to which he attaches a brief recording, asking her to come to the research station. The recording is just a snippet of a young girl speaking in an unknown language and Wyatt insists that he needs Val’s expertise to decipher it. Val suffers from anxiety: “the crippling kind. I’m tethered to the familiar, the safe, or what I perceive as safe,” she explains in the first-person narrative Ferencik employs to tell the story. She pays a visit to her ninety-one-year-old father at the nursing home where he is cared for. He was once a climate scientist “with a fierce intellect and fiercer temper,” and Val has always known that Andy was his favorite child. Because their father has never believed that Andy killed himself, he convinces Val to go to Greenland not only to solve the mystery about the language the young girl is speaking, but also to find the truth about Andy’s death. He persuades Val, in part because Andy and Val made a pact to never hurt themselves and Val can’t accept that Andy broke his promise.

With her anxiety medication in hand, Val travels to the research station for a seven-week mission. There, in addition to Wyatt, are married polar marine scientists Nora and Rajeev Chandra-Revard who will be working in a dome over the ice, diving into the icy water to retrieve samples and specimens to be studied. Like Val, they have signed a contract prohibiting them from discussing the girl anywhere except at the site. Jeanne, the station’s mechanic and cook who lost her husband and daughter to a drunk driver, decided to leave Minnesota to work with Wyatt at the research facility.

Wyatt explains how he found the girl encased in ice, frozen as though running, and with a battery-powered saw cut a huge block loose and transported it to camp. He adamantly claims that she thawed out alive. Since then she has only screamed and thrashed about, breaking lamps and dumping everything out of the kitchen drawers. “She’s freaked-out and confused. Inconsolable.” Indeed, when Val first comes face to face with her, she screams and runs away. She refuses to bathe and wears a far-too-large, filthy Christmas sweater that once belonged to either Wyatt or Jeanne. Wyatt demands that whatever progress Val makes be reported solely to him.

Ferencik relates a fascinating tale about how Val, a woman who must suddenly confront her demons, bonds with the little girl. Eventually her named is revealed to be Sigrid. Val works to gain the child’s trust even as she becomes increasingly distrustful of Wyatt, the stories he tells, and his motives. Gradually, Val and Sigrid form a tenuous bond, as Sigrid repeats words that Val struggles to understand — they appear to contain only fragments of the languages about which she is knowledgeable. (The language Sigrid speaks was actually created by Ferencik to tell the tale.) Sigrid draws the same picture over and over, with increasing vehemence that convinces Val she is attempting to communicate something vitally important. But what is she trying to convey? At the same time, Val’s suspicions about Wyatt are heightened by her discoveries of evidence related to his ongoing research and experiments. Val forms an alliance with Nora and Raj, who are also growing extremely wary of Wyatt, and keeps her progress with Sigrid a secret from him, fearful of what he may be capable of doing with the information.

Ferencik’s evocative prose sweeps readers off to Greenland, along with Val. Her descriptions of Val’s hourney to the research station, as well as the terrain and harsh conditions, are stunning, providing an immersive backdrop against which her story plays out. Her characters are well-defined, especially Val, a highly intelligent and empathic linguist who has recently divorced a “rageaholic.” She battles anxiety that limits her ability to fully experience life, and her trip to Greenland — the exact place where her twin brother recently died — exacerbates her fears and misgivings. But she is committed to her work and, once she meets little Sigrid, feels a deep commitment to helping the child communicate what she has endured and, hopefully, be returned her to her home and family.

When Val first arrives, Sigrid does not, according to Ferencik, see the value in communicating. She appears to be about seven or eight years old, but if Wyatt’s story can be believed, she was frozen in the ice for hundreds of years. She has awakened in a strange place, surrounded by people who dress and speak in ways she could never have imagined, and as time goes on, she begins to sense who among the adults are her friends and who cannot be trusted. She becomes ill and her desperation to make Val understand what is happening to her and what she needs intensifies. As Val begins piecing together the clues that Sigrid is providing, it is clear that there is no time to waste, and Val must secret her progress from Wyatt, whose behavior becomes increasingly erratic and frightening. She grows defiantly protective of Sigrid.

Ferencik says, “A big part of being human is a deep desire to be understood. Really understood, because if we don’t feel seen, there is no bigger loneliness.” Communication is the centerpiece of Ferencik’s story, but it is not limited to the burgeoning transmission of information and feelings between Val and Sigrid. Val must look at Sigrid’s movements and gestures, listen to her, pay attention to her inflection, and study her drawings (that she hides from Wyatt) in an effort to understand what Sigrid is trying to tell her. Ferencik also showcases the various ways that Val and the other characters communicate, and how their communication style impacts their relationships, especially in the case of Val’s troubled relationship with the father she always believed viewed her as second best to Andy.

Grief is another theme explored in the story. Every character is grieving in some way. Val is mourning Andy, Sigrid misses her family, and Jeanne has escaped to Greenland after tragically losing her husband and daughter. Wyatt is “grieving himself and his lack of success,” while Nora and Raj have lost a child, which is one of the reasons why they form a strong attachment to Sigrid.

Grief is intricately intertwined with fear, and Val’s anxiety causes her to fear many things. Can she overcome her fears in time to prevent tragedy? “I’ve always loved thrillers that take place in challenging settings,” Ferencik relates. And a more challenging setting is difficult to imagine. The “great polar Enormity” — as Val calls it — enhances the risks associated with simply existing (the dangers include subzero temperatures, blinding snows, and polar bears, just for starters). That, coupled with the circumstances in which Val finds herself, and Ferencik’s deft acceleration of the story’s pace toward an explosive conclusion, make the dramatic tension palpable and compelling.

Ferencik notes that when readers finish reading the book, she hopes they feel that “there still is wonder in the world and they are so much braver than they think they are in all kinds of ways — overcoming grief and doing things they’ve never tried before.” With Girl In Ice she has crafted an engrossing adventure imbued with elements of science fiction and mystery, at the heart of which is an insightful and thought-provoking examination of the way in which people communicate with each other and overcome fear, as well as a commentary on climate change and what we can let science teach us. Readers will find themselves taking both Vale and little Sigrid into their hearts, cheering Val on as she strives to overcome her fears and provide Sigrid with what she needs to survive . . . before time runs out.

Excerpt from Girl In Ice

Chapter One

Seeing the name “Wyatt Speeks” in my inbox hit me like a physical blow. Everything rushed back: the devastating phone call, the disbelief, the image of my brother’s frozen body in the Arctic wasteland.

I shut my laptop, pasted a weak smile on my face. There would be no bursting into tears at school. Grief was for after hours, for the nightly bottle of Merlot, for my dark apartment, for waking on the couch at dawn, the blue light of the TV caressing my aching flesh.

No, at the moment my job was to focus on the fresh, eager face of my graduate student as she petitioned for a semester in Tibet, a project in a tiny village deep in the Himalayas accessible only via treacherous mountain passes on foot and maybe llama, all to decipher a newly discovered language. As I listened to her impassioned plea — trying to harness my racing heart — an old shame suffused me.

The truth was, I’d never embarked into the field anyplace more frightening than a local graveyard to suss out a bit of Old English carved into a crumbling stone marker. And even then I made sure to go in broad daylight, because dead people — even underground — frightened me too. Never had my curiosity about a place or a language and its people overridden my just say no reflex. Citing schedule conflicts, I’d declined a plum semester-long gig in the Andean mountains of Peru to study quipu, or “talking knots” — cotton strings of differing lengths tied to a cord carried from village to village by runners, each variation in the string signaling municipal facts: taxes paid or owed; births and deaths; notices of famine, drought, crop failure, plague, and so on. I’d even passed on the once-in-a-lifetime chance to deconstruct a language carved into the two-thousand-year-old Longyou caves in Quzhou, China.

Why?

Anxiety: the crippling kind. I’m tethered to the familiar, the safe, or what I perceive as safe. I function normally in only a handful of locations: my apartment, most places on campus — excluding the football stadium, too much open space — the grocery store, my father’s nursing home. During my inaugural trip to the new, huge, and sparkly Whole Foods — chilled out on a double dose of meds — a bird flew overhead in the rafters. All I could think was, When is it going to swoop down and peck my eyes out? I never went back.

Ironically, I was the one with the power to give or withhold the stamp of approval for my students’ research trips, as if I were any judge of risk and character. Watching the glistening eyes of the young woman before me, one of my favorite students, I stalled a few moments—tossing out a couple of insipid questions about her goals — an attempt to soak up her magic normalcy. No such luck. I signed off on her trip to Tibet wondering,How does she see me, really? I knew she was fond of me, but — that casual wave of her silver-braceleted hand as she turned to leave, that look in her eye! I swear I caught a glint of pity, of disdain. It was like she knew my secret. Her teacher was a fraud.

I’M A LINGUIST. I can get by in German and most Romance tongues, and I’ve got a soft spot for dead languages: Latin, Sanskrit, ancient Greek. But it’s the extinct tongues — Old Norse and Old Danish — that enrapture me.

Languages reveal what it is to be human. This desire to make ourselves understood is primal. We make marks on paper, babble snippets of sound — then agree, by way of miracle — that these scribblings or syllables actually mean something, all so we can touch each other in some precise way. Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love, from the particular love of a new mother for her baby to one for unrequited romantic love, but it has twice as many for grief. My favorite is sokaparayana, which means “wholly given up to sorrow.” A strange balm of a word, gentle coming off my tongue.

Though words came easily for me, I tended to miss the patterns that were staring me in the face. The fact that my ex genuinely wanted out didn’t hit me until divorce papers were served. The fact of my father passing from just old to genuinely ill with lung cancer and not-here-for-much-longer didn’t sink in until I was packing up the family home and found myself on my knees in tears, taken down by dolor repentino, a fit of sudden pain. The stark realization that my twin brother, Andy—the closest person in the world to me—had been pulling away for months came to me only after his death and at the very worst times: lecturing in an auditorium packed with students, conversing with the dean in the hallway. When it happened, these vicious, sudden, psychic stabs, I’d briefly close my eyes or turn away to cough, repeating to myself: sokaparayana, sokaparayana, until I could speak again.

I felt safest in my office, alone with my books, charts, runic symbols, and scraps of old text; and when I deciphered a chunk of language — even a word! — a thrill of understanding juddered up my spine. The distance between me and another human being, just for that moment, was erased. It was as if someone were speaking to me, and me alone.

For two decades, these glimmers of connection had been enough to sustain me, but over time, they began to lose their shine. These private revelations no longer fed me, warmed me like they had. I yearned to be drawn closer to the human heart. Not through words — however telling or ingenious — but in the living world.

AT PRECISELY EIGHT o’clock that night — the end of office hours — I got up and locked the door. Squared my shoulders, smoothed my skirt, and sat back down. Outside my window, remorseless late-August sun cast long shadows across the drought-singed grass of the quad.

I clicked open my email. The subject line was blank, but then, Wyatt had never bothered with niceties. My head pounded with end-of-summer-session exhaustion. I was in no mood to hear from Professor Speeks about my brother, his fond recollections of mentoring Andy through the rigors of grad school, or even some funny thing Andy had said or done during their year together on the ice.

I considered deleting the message without reading it, but a tingling buzzed my fingers. Something said: Don’t. Still, I resisted until some darker knowledge swarmed up from the base of my spine, warning me it would be a terrible mistake not to open it.

From: Wyatt.Speeks@ArcticGreenlandScience.org

To: VChesterfield@Brookview.edu

Hey Val, hope you’re doing well, all things considered. Something’s happened out here. We found a body in the ice out on Glacier 35A. A young girl. We were able to cut through the ice and bring her back to the compound. Val, she thawed out alive. Don’t ask me to explain it, I can’t. She’s eight, nine years old, I’m guessing. And she’s talking pretty much nonstop, but in a language I’ve never heard before. Even Pitak, our supply runner from Qaanaaq, had no idea, and he speaks Inuktun. Jeanne’s stumped, too, so we’re both just keeping the girl fed and nodding our heads a lot and trying to figure out what to do next.

I’ve pasted here one of her vocalizations. Maybe you can figure out what she’s saying? You’re the expert. Give it a try, then call me as soon as you can. And please don’t tell anyone about this.

Wyatt

The MP3 stuttered across my screen like a city skyline. The girl thawed out alive?

Sweat bloomed on my brow, even though the air conditioner was blasting. I got up, walked to my window, sat back down. Checked the time: too early for a pill. I knocked back the remaining swallow of stale coffee in my mug, rattled open my file drawer, extracted a bottle of Amaretto, and filled the cup halfway. The sweet, warm alcohol hit my empty stomach fast. Smoothed away the sharp edges.

I thought about all the times I’d let Andy’s voice play in my head these past five months, how he was still so alive for me in this way. Memories of us as kids chasing each other through the lake house in upstate New York, T-shirts still damp from swimming. Or cozied up with our beloved mutt Frida, playing go fish and Monopoly while our parents got tight and happy on cocktails: a rare glimmer of joy during their disintegrating marriage. And so we were comforted, sharing the delusion that if we were just good enough, they would stay together.

Little by little I’d pored over the photos, letting myself “feel everything,” as my shrink instructed. Mourning every shirt and shoe, I gave away or got rid of his clothes and belongings; though, there were a few I couldn’t part with, his drawings especially. The only other place he lived on was in my phone: a dozen saved messages remained.

Now, on my screen, the forward arrow on the voice clip throbbed red. My finger trembled as it hovered over the play button. I steadied it, pushing down.

The first slam to my gut was the panic in this high, sweet girl voice that—even if you didn’t understand a word she said—made you want to reach out and wrap her in a hug. The tremulous ache in her utterly foreign words only intensified in the twenty-eight-second clip, as if she was pleading for something. I tried to picture this child trapped in the ice, to imagine what horrors had brought her there.

I played it again.

What language is this?

Of course, West Greenlandic was my first guess, but I heard no correlation. It wasn’t Danish, either — Greenland had been settled by Danes — but no, this was Danish put through a blender and mixed with what, Finnish? Not quite that, either. The vowels were too long, the accent on the last syllable. It wasn’t Norwegian, clearly, and it was too clipped and choppy to be Swedish. I pulled up some Old Norse, the language of the Vikings, and listened alongside the girl’s quavering voice. The cadences were similar in places, but I couldn’t match up a single word. This language was completely new to me.

I was lost.

I listened again.

And again.

My face grew hot. Breath clouding the screen, I leaned in close, as if proximity might help.

Nothing — all I understood was raw emotion.

I sat back. Tried to recall all I knew linguistically about where Wyatt was — where Andy had died.

Three main dialects of Greenlandic were spoken in Greenland: West Greenlandic, East Greenlandic, and Inuktun, which had only about a thousand native speakers. In grad school, I’d been fascinated by this culture built from animal skin, sinew, bone, stone, snow, and ice, but in the end, I became more of a generalist. I deciphered languages quickly — given enough context and clues.

I got up and paced, holding my drink. The reality was, I didn’t have to do anything. I could pretend I never opened the email. Ignore Wyatt’s calls. All I wanted was to crawl back home and hide with my booze and my misery and never come out.

If only I hadn’t heard her voice! I could have forgotten the whole thing. But even after the clip stopped playing I could still hear her, feel the sound, a high thrum in my jaw. Talking to Wyatt — even emailing him — brought back all the horror with Andy, but who was this girl? And why no picture or video — was there something he didn’t want me to see? I turned, taking stock of the four walls of my tiny world. My achingly familiar posters, bookshelves, knickknacks — even my framed honors and awards — both comforted and repulsed me. It’s just a phone call, Val, I thought. For the love of God, you can do this.

I knocked back the rest of my Amaretto and picked up the landline to dial Wyatt halfway around the world at his climate research station on Taararmiut Island, translated “land of shadows,” off Greenland’s northwest coast. Already my palm was slick with sweat as I listened to the odd dud-dud-dud of the international call. If it wasn’t too cloudy, and the antennae hadn’t been ripped away by the near constant fifty-mile-per-hour winds, the satellite call would go through, and there would be simply no going back.