Elizabeth McGregor

Even Oprah would roll her eyes.

That’s the one thought rolling loop-de-loop in my brain as my eyes neared the end of their exhausting journey through The Ice Child’s 370-plus pages.

The other word that kept echoing in my inner ear was: Puh-leeze!

No, not even the talk-show book club diva would wish this contrived slop upon her legions of faithful book club readers. At first glance, the elements would seem ripe for La Winfrey to stamp her big O on the cover—there’s a mother who faces show more a Tough Life Crisis, there’s a race against time, there are tears, there’s empowerment. But there’s also a lot of bad, bad writing, most of which seems to have been hastily penned on the back of a sob-soaked tissue. Puh-leeze.

British author Elizabeth McGregor makes her American debut with this novel and while she obviously has a lot of enthusiasm and passion for her book and its characters, I cannot say the same after turning the last page with a sigh of relief. I’m sure McGregor would wish that her readers heave a sigh of satisfaction, and maybe some of them will. But those are the kind of readers whose hearts go pitter-pat when reading Danielle Steele and Anita Shreve or, even further back, Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart and Phyllis A. Whitney.

Yes, boys and girls, The Ice Child is retro-romance, all slopped up with modern briskness.

I’ve got to admire McGregor for one thing: she obviously spent a lot of time in dusty libraries, museum archives and the deepest reaches of cyberspace. The amount of research shows, as apparent as the neat-stitched seams on a baseball, at every turn in the novel. McGregor has taken on three stories here, all of them woven together under extremely tenuous similarities:

*the fate of the doomed Franklin party, the arctic expedition which searched for the Northwest Passage 150 years ago, then mysteriously vanished when the ships became ice-bound;

*a polar bear and her cub who are on an equally mysterious journey across the ice pack in the area where Franklin and his crew died;

*a modern London journalist named Jo who is on a desperate search for a bone marrow donor for her little boy.

Of those three plot strands, the only one I cared anything at all about was the portion devoted to the Franklin expedition. McGregor puts us right on board the two ships, the Terror and Erebus, and we feel the chill of the arctic, the pangs of starvation, the desperation of being hopelessly lost in an icebound landscape. I found myself wishing that McGregor had written only one of her three stories—this one. I was fascinated by the grueling fate of the men in the 1840s and wanted to read even more.

Here’s a taste of what to expect in the Franklin sections:

Terror sailed in Erebus’s wake, and barely had Erebus found her way through, when they saw the ice reforming behind her. They plunged into it, each man with a single hope in his heart.
Just through these miles. Just through this strait. There will be free water on the other side.
The ice did not surrender silently to them. Far from it. It whistled and whined and thundered; sometimes it sounded like animals baying, or like birds screeching. Sometimes it grumbled low, as if there were something under the waves, some sea monster, beating the underside of the ship. It was as if the ice were alive. It snaked and snapped and fell away from them, and as they pushed on from the front, it tugged at the stern, huge cold hands swatting the timber.

Okay, it ain’t Faulkner, but it’s a far cry better than what ice-jams the rest of the novel—Jo’s story which forms the core of the narrative. As the book opens, we see Jo grudgingly taking an assignment to interview maverick adventurer Doug Marshall, a tall, hairy fellow who’s on a harebrained mission in the arctic. Marshall is obsessed with the fate of Franklin and has spent most of his adult life trying to find the wreckage of the ships.

Eventually, Jo catches up to him, gets her interview and—this should come as no surprise to Victoria Holt fans—falls head over heels in love. Well, there are complications. Marshall’s married, for one thing. And, typically, it’s a sour, nearly-dissolved marriage to a shrew named Alicia (a character filled with such venomous vindictiveness that she approaches caricature). And then there’s Marshall’s temperamental 19-year-old son John who shares his father’s obsession for the lost arctic explorers—even though he’s all wound up in knots because, as a father, Doug has always been as cold and distant as Greenland.

Things happen—chains of eye-rolling/Puh-leeze tragic circumstances—which I won’t go into here for the sake of those one or two readers who bravely want to attempt The Ice Child and don’t wish to know all the spoilers beforehand. But, suffice to say, eventually Jo gives birth to Doug’s child. That boy is born with a rare blood disease and the only hope of saving him is a bone-marrow transplant. John is the closest and best match. But, get this, John is now lost in the arctic in his quest to find the remains of the Franklin party.

The Ice Child has such heated, soap-opera language that it eventually melts down to a puddle in your hands. Have some towels ready to mop up the mess, especially when you get dialogue like this between Jo and her doctor:

She sobbed. “John won’t be a match, he will never come back. Sam is going to die.â€?
“You mustn’t believe that,â€? he said.
“Don’t start telling me what to believe again!â€?
“I’m not,â€? he said. “I’m telling you that you must hold on.â€?
“I can’t,â€? she cried. “I can’t bear another day of watching him go from me. I can’t do it anymore.â€?

Puh-leeze. show less

A somewhat convoluted, but still very interesting examination of the death of Sir Theodosius Boughton, for which his brother-in-law John Donellan was tried and convicted. Cooke runs through the circumstances of Boughton's death, the complicated questions of who would benefit from his death, and offers a thorough rundown of Donellan's trial.

The complex nature of the case creates some issues for the narrative, which bounces back and forth a bit and repeats itself occasionally. But Cooke's show more done an admirable job of trying to unpack this case for modern readers. show less

This is one of those psychological thrillers with an added dash of horror level suspense that will have you gripping the book and flipping pages as your attention is captured by an intense storyline. Beware you may find yourself staying up late into the night trying to get from one cover to the next without stopping; if you do, you won’t be disappointed. It’s definitely one of the more unique thrillers on the market.

The creepy, skin tingling factor is set on high as you’re taken show more through a story that will yank you through twists and turns you never saw coming. It’s not overly fast paced but what she lacks for in pep is more than made up in character development with a complex group of people who are richly described and given realistic storylines.

Fair warning, the book opens with a bit of a rough start and a character it’s hard to care about, in fact she irritated me to the point I wanted to pay for her therapy myself. Something horrific is also done to a living entity and I’m just going to leave it at that; one of the character’s is channeling their inner sociopath so let’s just say it was pretty rough reading for a bit. show less

This story, while it has little to do with the book description, actually was much better than I expected. It told the story of 'parents' of different times, sexes, and species all trying to find safety and salvation for their 'children.' It struck a deep cord and truly warmed my heart.