I enjoyed this far more than I expected to. It is the story of a linguist who is called to the arctic to help out with a thawed out person speaking an ancient language.
The premise is impossible,but, if you can put that aside, characters are relatively interesting and
Story is different enough to hold interest ( )

(2022)Starts slowly, but really picks up at the end. A young girl is found frozen in ice in Greenland. The ice is cut out and when she thaws out, she is alive. The scientific station that finds her, brings in Val, a linguist, to try to communicate. It's determined that she must be 100s of years old as her language is too archaic for modern times. The story is really a warning of global warming and its affect on weather. KIRKUS: When a girl frozen in ice at the Arctic Circle thaws out alive, an ancient Nordic languages specialist with troubles of her own is called to the scene.Ferencik¥author of Into the Jungle (2019)Â¥specializes in thrillers set in wilderness environments with female protagonists; her latest takes us to the land of subzero temperatures and wind-whipped polar landscapes. But bad weather is just the beginning of the unpleasantness Val Chesterfield encounters when she overcomes her many phobias to fly out and help climate scientist Wyatt Speeks with his perplexing specimen. The girl he chopped out of the wall of a crevasse and defrosted is terrified, violent, and unintelligible. While Wyatt is creepy on many levels, creepiest of all is his unwillingness to discuss the death by exposure of his erstwhile lab partner, Val's twin brother, Andy. Andy's having gotten locked out of the house overnight in his underwear has been presented as a suicide, but neither Val nor her father, also a climate scientist, believe it. Belief is a problem all through this bookÂ¥the elements made up to serve the plot rest on a foundation of real climate science, linguistics, and cultural history but still don't manage to be convincing. The five charactersÂ¥Val, Wyatt, a nasty cook, and a pair of married marine scientistsÂ¥are also less than lifelike. Saddled with mental health issues and bad manners, their interactions range from rude to abusive except for the married couple, who are so in love it's nauseating. You really wouldn't want to be stuck in a room with these people, which poor Val is much of the time, and now someone has stolen her anxiety meds and hidden the booze! She finds herself becoming deeply attached to the mystery girl, but progress with communication is slow, and the girl's health takes a drastic turn for the worse. And then they all go outside and things get crazy.Tense, claustrophobic, and a bit hard to swallow.Pub Date: March 1, 2022ISBN: 978-1-9821-4302-2Page Count: 304Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster

I don't read a lot of books in this kind of "modern thriller" genre, if that's what you call it. I'm more of a magic and aliens kinda guy, but my wife got this as a gift and we thought we'd give it a try. We both liked it a lot and couldn't wait to find out how it would all come together and whether there would be any monsters or anything supernatural involved.

The writing was good, the characters felt pretty well fleshed out and the setting was cool. It was a really easy read because there weren't a bunch of factions to keep track of and tons of background characters, no crazy names and new cultures/races to be described and ancient made-up histories. ( )

The premise of this story is fascinating - a young girl unfrozen from the ice in Greenland with a scientist linguist brought in to try and decipher her language. The problem is that the linguist and all of the other scientists involved in this project are secretive, neurotic or just plain crazy - it was aggravating. The ending was handled so abruptly that within the space of one page, the setting moved from the icy shores of Greenland to the linguist talking on the phone to her father about strawberry licorice. I like Erica Ferencik's novels, but this one could have been handled so much better - somewhat disappointing. ( )

This literary speculative fiction thriller not only tackles issues of language and first-contact colonialism, as well as climate change and what we’re doing to the planet, but also what it means to overcome your greatest fears in order to do the right thing. ( )