"Girl in Ice"

Erica Ferencik is the award-winning author of the acclaimed thrillers The River at Night, Into the Jungle, and Girl in Ice, which The New York Times Book Review declared “hauntingly beautiful.”

Ferencik applied the Page 69 Test to Girl in Ice and reported the following:

Page 69 of Girl in Ice drops the reader into linguist Val Chesterfield’s early moments at the remote climate research station off the coast of Greenland, where a young girl has thawed from a glacier speaking a language no one understands.

Skipping to page 69 of Girl in Ice would be an eerily informative experience. You’d get the feels about Val’s sense of isolation in this desolate landscape. The other researchers, a pair of married marine scientists, are off on the ice cap, and Val is left alone with Sigrid – the thawed girl – and Jeanne, the mechanic, all day, for days on end. Val’s only job is to try to communicate with Sigrid, and she’s been failing miserably at it, since the girl is – for whatever reason – rejecting Val at every turn.

We learn that Val’s anxiety is ratcheting up; she’s begun to ration her pills.

But on this page – a breakthrough – Sigrid takes the lead by wrapping herself in warm clothes and – by her actions – she begs Val to let her go outside. She also says a word in her own language.

In an eerie comment, Jeanne remarks that (Sigrid) “just wants to go home…” What does Jeanne know about Sigrid that we don’t? Jeanne also uses the last pint of cream “before powder only” adding to the sense of isolation.

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--Marshal Zeringue