This was brilliant! Girl in Ice was a book that had me tearing through the pages to see what would happen next. Mysterious Sigrid was the little eight-year-old girl who was found frozen in ice in arctic Greenland, brought into the lab, and thawed. Amazingly, she lived. How was this possible. How long had she been in the ice.

Val, a linguist familiar with languages from that part of the world, was brought to the outpost in hopes of being able to communicate with the girl. I could feel the frustration of both Val and Sigrid as they began their futile attempts at understanding one another.

There were so many stories happening, including Val’s personal insecurities, Val’s dealing with the death of her twin brother, the interactions of the others on this project, the horrendous weather, and so much more that kept this fast-paced book fast paced.

The relationship between Val, who didn’t interact well with kids, and Sigrid, who trusted no one, was expertly developed; it evolved into a tender love. Other characters were interesting as well, some likable, some not so much. I wondered how this could possibly end satisfactorily; it did.

Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book. I loved it. You have a great imagination, Ms. Ferencik.

Girl in Ice tells several stories, and unravels a few mysteries. It is both a warning of climate change, and a glimmer of hope. Linguist Val finds herself summoned to an Arctic exploration station in Greenland - the site of her twin brother's supposed suicide, to assist in helping understand a young girl that has recently been thawed from a glacier - and is alive. Terrified and anxious, Val heads to Greenland, desperate to know the truth about her brother, and to try and untangle the language of the girl - which does not resemble any languages of today. From the beginning I detested Wyatt, and was suspicious of the activity at the station. Val arrives with a young couple, who are researching other sea life. The young girl captivates Val, who struggles to learn what language she is speaking, and to communicate with her. Through drawings, Val realizes the girl is sick and will perish without intervention. The whole situation becomes even more bizarre when the research team attempts to thaw another child from the glacier - a baby boy. I got to a point where I could not stop reading - the ending is pretty implausible, but it was a great winter read, and very different. Thanks to Netgalley for an Advance reader copy.

"Never had my curiosity about a place or a language overridden my 'just say no' reflex. I'm tethered to the familiar...what I perceive as safe...".

Val Chesterfield was a linguist with a fascination for extinct tongues-Old Norse and Old Danish. By dissecting words into morphemes (the smallest unit of language that has meaning) and "deciphering a chuck of language-even a word... the distance between me and another human being, just for that moment, was erased."

On a remote Greenland Island above the Arctic Circle, Climate Scientist Wyatt Speeks discovered an eight year old girl, in ice, in Glacier 35A. After being thawed out alive, she screamed in fear, in an unknown tongue. Wyatt e-mailed Val with a plea to come to the climate research station at Nuunyviak Island, off Greenland's northwest coast. Val's twin brother Andy, mentored by Wyatt, had recently taken his own life while stationed there. Despite her misgivings and riddled with anxiety, Val decided to go to Greenland to solve two mysteries. She was determined to discover why Andy was found outside the Arctic station, frozen to death, wearing only boxer shorts. and was poised to decode the strange language spoken by the young girl.

A little girl, frozen in place ten feet down the wall of a crevasse, was now cast into unfamiliar, scary surroundings. Val needed to learn as much as possible about what happened to her. Caribou skin coat...sealskin leggings...sealskin shirt...the usual outfit for indigenous people in super remote settlements. "In a salad of languages including Old Norse, Val spoke to the girl [Sigrid] through a closed door...Just a child, but from what world, and how could [Val] possibly enter it?"

Wyatt was very secretive. He wanted to be in the loop about everything concerning Sigrid's communications. But...why was he not forthcoming about his pet mouse, Odin, and the fact that Odin had been frozen and brought back to life more than once? What other truths might Wyatt be hiding? Polar night, coming in October, would engulf the research station into total darkness with prevailing temperatures of sixty below or colder. Val was told she had only weeks to create a bond with Sigrid and decode her language.

Her molars were worn down, a wild child, living in a world where caribou hides were chewed to soften them. "[Sigrid's] expressive face, capable of conveying humor, sarcasm, pain, delight, fear and maybe even love...moaning two words over and over...the words felt like pure emotion..." Drawings of circles....birds...snakes...Sigrid's health was waning. What was she trying to say?

"Girl in Ice" by Erica Ferencik is a thriller that speaks to the issue of climate change. In Ferencik's own words, her "passion is to create un-put-downable novels set in some of the most inhospitable regions on earth." For this reader, that goal was accomplished! Highly recommended.

Thank you Gallery/Scout Press and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I can't remember the last time I read a thriller that was so hauntingly beautiful. I know it's only February, but this is very easily going to make my top 5 of 2022. Usually with this much happening in a thriller, things get lost, storylines don't live up to expectations and some things are usually left without an explanation. That doesn't happen with this book. You have Val who we're meant to see as flawed and broken but she lives in this beautiful world of languages. There's the girl. Did she really thaw from the ice? If so, when is she from? How did she survive the ice? If not, where did she come from? And then there's Andy, Val's twin brother. Did he really commit suicide or was he murdered? Did an experiment go wrong and the suicide is just a cover up? You have all these storylines and more that combine to make this a wonderful thriller.

But then you also have these beautiful interactions between Val and the girl. A little background about me: I discovered the field of linguistics post-college and missed my chance to "professionally" study it, but I consider myself to be a word nerd. I'm obsessed with learning other languages' idioms and metaphors. I love the concept of "untranslatable" words. Words like the German fernweh, which means being homesick for a place you've never been to. In English, wanderlust, but wanderlust doesn't quite capture the beauty of the German definition. These untranslatable words pop up many times during Val's communication with the girl. Trying to piece together meaning from these vague word definitions. This blending of languages is really what pushed this book over the edge for me. I found myself repeating the girls words aloud every time I read them. Even with no personal connection to this language, I could feel the emotions Val described. The emotions the girl is trying to express. My only complaint about this book is that it kept me up waaaay past my bedtime. While I would heavily recommend this book, I will tell you not to start it if you have anything important happening the next day because you will stay up all night trying to finish it.

A powerful read. I was riveted to this book until I finished. What possesses a woman to travel To a remote outpost in the Arctic? The place where her brother died. A place where a girl was frozen in ice and revived. Val is a language specialist. But can she decipher the land’s language as well as ice girl’s? And just what are they trying to tell her?
A lot of heart pounding scenes to plow through in this book. It’s a different Type of read for me, but it was so good.
However, I will not be traveling to a frozen outpost where there are sinister vibes for any reason or amount Of money.

This book was great, the characters were well developed. The plot was interesting. Highly recommend it.

I read this over a weekend,I was immediately drawn in the setting the characters it kept me on the edge of my seat.So well written a true page turner.I will be recommending this book and the other books by this author.#netgalley #gallery

Wyatt, a climate scientist finds a young girl frozen in ice in the Arctic Circle who likely died 100's of years ago. He thaws her and she's alive. He enlists the help of Val, a language expert, to learn to communicate with the girl who is speaking an unknown language. Val is also looking for answers to her brother's mysterious death. Her brother who worked with Wyatt.

This story pulled me in immediately. I thought the story was unique, chilling and at times a little creepy. Not sure if creepy is the right word but you have a group of people far from civilization in a frozen tundra. It's hard to know who to trust and with that isolation it's easy to go a little crazy. I loved the growth that Val's character had throughout the story as she learned more about the girl in ice. The story kept me on the edge of my seat because I wanted to know why the girl was able to be revived after being in ice. There's also the side story of Val's brother's mysterious death. Overall this story was clever. I would love to know how the author thought of this story as well as what kind of research went into the story. I've had this on my NetGalley shelf since August. I guess my only regret is that it took me this long to read it.

This story falls in the middle for me. The characters don't have a medium as far as their personality goes. Therefore, it's very easy to guess what was going on. Therefore, the mystery of Andy's death doesn't play out as a surprise as the author intended. Val's personality is on the timid and scared side of the spectrum whereas Wyatt is too brazen. What was great that Erica Ferencik did was bring to life the story of the people of Greenland. Most of the world does not know of these people and their way of life as well as their language. The interesting aspect was the language in this story. Overall, the story was weak and some characters are not well developed such as Jeanne.

Thank you to Gallery Books, Gallery/Scout Press and NetGalley for letting me read this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

An other worldly story of a linguist who goes to the desolation of the Arctic to decipher the language of a girl who shows up out of seemingly nowhere. The setting and its description and the beauty of language make this a beautiful yet riveting read. A mystery involving a dead brother along with the origins of the little girl builds tension and makes this a quick and enjoyable story.

Copy provided by the publisher and NetGalley

I’m on the fence about this one, but it leans more to a so-so for me. Billed as a thriller/suspense, I’d also call it science fiction as well as an environmental treatise.

Val is an anxiety-suffering linguist who steps out of her comfort zone in MA to journey to a remote research station in the Arctic Circle where her twin brother committed suicide five months earlier. She is tasked with trying to communicate with an 8-year-old, seemingly indigenous girl, who has been
found frozen and brought back to life. Wyatt, her brother’s research mentor, is desperate and obsessed with communicating with her and finding the key to this miraculous event.

I felt like this plot was trying to tackle too much and didn’t quite meet all the challenges. Val waffles between crippling anxiety (treated with drugs/alcohol), Wyatt is a mix of aggression/charm, Jeanne (the cook/mechanic) has a tragic past of loss and well, we don’t really learn a lot about Raj and Nora, the young married couple collecting aquatic life samples. The multiple questions include: Did Val’s brother really commit suicide; Is Wyatt friend or foe; Is Sigrid (girl in the ice) actually from a more distant past; How is her resurrection possible; and How to keep her alive. There are also moral dilemmas that left me queasy at times.

I found this slow in places, choppy in places and the ending felt rushed. And while the premise is undeniably fascinating, with the other goings-on I didn’t feel as invested in the science issues as I should have been. The denouement also felt a bit too bizarre with not enough follow-up explanation.
So while parts were great, overall I just wasn’t very invested.

My thanks to #NetGalley and #GalleryBooks for providing me the free early arc of #GirlInIce for review. The opinions are strictly my own.

Val, a highly regarded linguistics professor, must overcome her own demons in order to survive the frozen Artic, in this interesting yet flawed tale. Girl In Ice isn’t quite sure what it wants to be, psychological thriller, science fiction, or fantasy. Told in first person through Val’s point of view, we see a very flawed and dependent character, but as the story proceeds her growth is somewhat believable, yet why is she so secretive? I understand not trusting Wyatt, yet even the reader isn’t privy to her findings. Wyatt, the expedition leader, is identified very early in the book as the villain of the story. The pacing alternates between slow in the first half of the book and a bit choppy in the last quarter of the book. Also, the circumstances that lead to the demise of a couple of characters is unclear. What happened to the line? I would have liked a more satisfying answer. The girl’s illness doesn’t make sense. Is this something that will happen to her for the remainder of her life? I would have liked a more satisfying explanation in the conclusion. I wanted to like this book, but I finished this novel with unanswered questions, which annoys me.

Get a glimpse into what it is like at a research facility at the Arctic circle. Val goes there as a linguist as Wyatt tells her he has thawed a girl out and brought her back to life. Val sufferers from anxiety but goes to find out what happened to her brother who died there. Will she be able to help this girl and be able to communicate with her? Freaky but well written.

Thrillers are not my usual read, but this one had me on the edge of my seat. Don't read it alone at night. It truly is full of terror. I slept with the light on. One of those disturbing books that you just can't put down. That you NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this one.

I think if this book were marketed differently, it would have gotten a higher star rating from me, as I would have saved it for the proper mood. As a thriller, it falls a bit flat due to the incredibly slow moving nature of the narrative, but as a thought provoking piece of environmental fiction, it gives life. I was a little disappointed that the initial mystery of the brother's death was somewhat cast aside for the majority of the book, but I loved the crisp setting and the interactions between Val and the "girl in ice". Recommended for those who are passionate about global warming and its affects on our world.

4.5*
Bundle up and get your cup of hot cocoa…it’s going to be a chilly trip to the Arctic Circle!

Val is a linguistics expert currently teaching at University level. She just received a life-changing call that a girl has literally been thawed out of a piece of ice in the frozen Arctic expanse. It’s impossible to determine how long she’d been entombed in ice. What is certain…she is most certainly alive! And talking. But no one can figure out what language. The lead researcher requests Val’s assistance to aid in assessing this very foreign speech. But there’s a major complication. It’s the same place her twin brother died under curious circumstances. Perhaps she can do double duty and find some closure while also assisting with this most fascinating discovery.

I loved the interactions between Val and the girl as she tries to gain her trust and learn to communicate.

This is the second book I’ve read by this author. Her previous, Into the Jungle had us venturing deep into the Bolivian jungle. Erica Ferencik adds a unique twist by including interesting facts about the global region her stories take place. Here, we’re venturing as far north as humanly possible.

With the added details she provides, I felt I was right there next to Val. The bitter cold, the stark vastness of the surroundings.

My bags are packed and passport in hand. I’m ready for my next adventure. Where are you taking us next, Ms. Ferencik?

Posted to: https://books-are-a-girls-best-friend...

Thank you to NetGalley and Gallery Books

Girl in Ice is a thrilling and engrossing atmospheric read. Ferenci does an excellent job of placing her readers at the scene through her vivid imagery, intriguing plot line, and brilliant but flawed characters.

Val Chesterfield, a linguist who specializes in extinct Nordic languages, is contacted by her twin brother's mentor Wyatt Specks, who is head of a climate research station in the Arctic Circle. He claims that they found a young girl frozen in the ice, and that after extracting and thawing her, she is alive! Wyatt needs Val's help to work with the girl and learn her language so that Wyatt and his team can understand what enabled her to survive being frozen.

Val is both interested and frightened. She suffers from crippling anxiety, even more so after the death of her twin Andy at the very station she is now being called to. His death was ruled a suicide, but Val's family has always wondered about the true circumstances; their father going so far as to say Andy was murdered.

Val accepts the assignment for both personal and professional reasons. She can't wait to get to the bottom of both stories!

This is a wonderful read. It is easy to visualize the deep, frigid cold and darkness, the isolation of the station, and the emotions of the characters. Do yourself a favor and add it to your TBR pile now!

My sincere thanks to the author and Gallery/Scout Press for allowing me to access an e-ARC via NetGalley. All opinions stated in this review are my own and are freely given.

Thanks to Gallery/Scout Press and to NetGalley for the review copy.

This was an intriguing novel with a setting that forces one to imagine; imagine past the bleak nothingness to a world where people, animals and more live now and lived 1000 years ago. The cast of characters was well developed, despite the language difficulties faced.

Kept me coming back for more.

This is a fascinating, multi-layered story that displays themes of scientific research, exploration, the Arctic, human relationships, death, the environment, and more. Val is a linguist with social anxieties who travels to a remote island near Greenland for two reasons - to learn more about her brother's supposed suicide, and to learn to communicate with a young girl who has been frozen for many years. Beautifully descriptive text, three-dimensional characters, and a unique and creative plot combine to make a riveting read. Highly recommended! Thanks to NetGalley and Gallery Books for providing an ARC.

This novel would make an excellent movie in the future. It has the right amount of suspense, mystery, and character development that you would expect would fit for a summer movie. And, I mean it as a compliment because I love summer movies.

The main character is one flawed human being. She has a ton of mental issues as well as having to deal with the death of her twin brother and a sick father could never really acknowledged her as more as just being there. So, when she is given the opportunity to continue her brother's work by going to the Arctic, she sees it as an opportunity to investigate what really happened to her brother. Of course, what results is more than what she expected.

I really enjoyed reading this book, and I'm looking forward to see what else the author publishes in the future. Thank you for the ARC from Netgalley.