Helpful Score: 1
Val is a complicated character. She not only is an expert on dead languages, but she relies on drugs and alcohol to remain on an even keel. She only feels comfortable in her apartment and most places on the campus where she teaches. She's always felt like two cents waiting on change due to her father's overweening preference for her climate scientist brother Andy. Yes indeed, this woman has issues with a capital I. But she loves her brother so much that she loads up on her meds and flies to Greenland in an attempt to find out what happened to him.
What she finds is equal parts strange and magical. As research scientist Wyatt Speeks tells her, "Nobody normal comes here. This place is just natural selection for people who want to leap off the edge of the world." And no one at the station is really normal. The magical part of the experience is Sigrid, the girl who was thawed back to life. Although Sigrid has a will of her own and, for the most part, refuses to cooperate, it soon becomes apparent that she knows more than she's letting on. Watching the interplay between these people is almost like reading a locked-room mystery.
There is so much to like about Girl in Ice. The scenes focusing on linguistics are stellar, and I loved learning why the Vikings named Iceland and Greenland the way they did. There's also a wonderful scene involving narwhals. But. Normally I have no problem willingly suspending my disbelief while reading a book. Something has to throw me back out of the pages. In Girl in Ice, two of the characters were almost too good to be true while another two were on the opposite end of the spectrum. And then there was the explanation for Sigrid's being able to be thawed out. How in the world did her people come across that little trick?
So while Girl in Ice has many good parts to it, it also raised some questions. Give it a read and see what you think.
(Review copy courtesy of the publisher and Net Galley)
What she finds is equal parts strange and magical. As research scientist Wyatt Speeks tells her, "Nobody normal comes here. This place is just natural selection for people who want to leap off the edge of the world." And no one at the station is really normal. The magical part of the experience is Sigrid, the girl who was thawed back to life. Although Sigrid has a will of her own and, for the most part, refuses to cooperate, it soon becomes apparent that she knows more than she's letting on. Watching the interplay between these people is almost like reading a locked-room mystery.
There is so much to like about Girl in Ice. The scenes focusing on linguistics are stellar, and I loved learning why the Vikings named Iceland and Greenland the way they did. There's also a wonderful scene involving narwhals. But. Normally I have no problem willingly suspending my disbelief while reading a book. Something has to throw me back out of the pages. In Girl in Ice, two of the characters were almost too good to be true while another two were on the opposite end of the spectrum. And then there was the explanation for Sigrid's being able to be thawed out. How in the world did her people come across that little trick?
So while Girl in Ice has many good parts to it, it also raised some questions. Give it a read and see what you think.
(Review copy courtesy of the publisher and Net Galley)
Takes place in ice-bound Greenland, where a bunch of scientists doing research have cut a frozen girl out of the ice and revived her. The main character is a linguist asked to communicate with her. The setting is vivid and most (not all) of the events in the action-packed plot are believable and exciting.
I was a bit dubious about whether it would take so long for a trained linguist to communicate with someone in an unknown language, but on the whole this was a very worthwhile read. Motivated me to order the author's other books.
I was a bit dubious about whether it would take so long for a trained linguist to communicate with someone in an unknown language, but on the whole this was a very worthwhile read. Motivated me to order the author's other books.
