Ice Out

By: Susan Speranza

Francesca Bodin has a near-perfect life as an accomplished music teacher and professional flutist living in the Vermont countryside with her husband Ben, and their four-year old daughter, Addie. This ends suddenly when a snowmobiling accident traps the three of them in a frozen lake. Ben, after escaping onto the ice, leaves her and Addie to die.

Francesca believes she sees their dog pull Addie from the lake and drag her into the nearby woods. Desperate to help her daughter, she crawls from the icy waters and follows them. Once she enters the forest, however, she finds herself trapped in a sinister, dream-like world where night never ends, where Addie’s whereabouts remain hidden from her, and where she encounters a group of women who, like Francesca, have been left to die and now seek to unleash their revenge on those who have harmed them. When they have Ben in their sights, Francesca realizes that if she is ever to escape this nightmare and save her daughter, she must first save the husband who abandoned them. 

If I had to sum up my initial reaction to this book, it would be one phrase – What the…..? And not in a good way!

I must have missed the point of this. Francesca falls through the ice at the beginning of the book. Then it takes most of the book for her to get out of the ice all the while reliving her life in flashbacks. A very normal, ordinary life. This takes so long by the time I got to the end of her part, I was a little muffed to discover that we now had to read Ben’s side of the story. 

Thankfully, Ben’s side doesn’t take as long. 

But then, it goes into this weird fantasy world that makes no sense about this group of women led by a  White Witch who encourages this group of women to some sort of strange afterlife torturing and “killing” of the men who killed them. 

Or something like it. 

Then the story comes into read time where we learn Ben left her on the ice just because he was scared (what a guy!) and the book ends not really on a great note? 

I really didn’t understand the point of this book. What story was being told? I couldn’t really grasp a theme or reason and couldn’t really relate to any of it. 

My rating: :star: