72. Girl in Ice by Erica Ferencik

listened on Libby - borrowed from Library

2022
304pgs.
Contemporary Adult Mystery (scifi?)
Finished 11/29/2022 - took ages to finish
Goodreads rating: 3.70
My rating: 3.5
Setting: contemporary cold, cold, cold Greenland

My comments: Set in Greenland at a tiny science research station in October as the days are getting very short and 24-hour darkness is almost upon them.  Although Val has crippling anxiety, she drowns herself in pills and booze to embark on the journey there when she is asked, as an expert in languages, to come to try to figure out what an 8-year old girl is trying to say. This girl has been thawed from the ice....and speaks a language that has never been heard before. Of course, there are a lot of mysterious, unacceptable things going on, and that will include, but the end of the story, many deaths.  It was interesting to listen to the story unfold, to consider the possibilities that were suggested, and to commiserate with the protagonist's anxiety issues.  Could there really be some sort of enzyme in an eanimal (eels in this case) that could actually prologn/reactivate/regenerate life?  I would have rated this a 4, but it was very draggy in places, which made me shave off half a point.

Goodreads synopsis:  From the author of The River at Night and Into the Jungle comes a harrowing new thriller set in the unforgiving landscape of the Arctic Circle, as a brilliant linguist struggling to understand the apparent suicide of her twin brother ventures hundreds of miles north to try to communicate with a young girl who has been thawed from the ice alive.

Valerie “Val” Chesterfield is a linguist trained in the most esoteric of disciplines: dead Nordic languages. Despite her successful career, she leads a sheltered life and languishes in the shadow of her twin brother, Andy, an accomplished climate scientist stationed on a remote island off Greenland’s barren coast. But Andy is gone: a victim of suicide, having willfully ventured unprotected into 50 degree below zero weather. Val is inconsolable—and disbelieving. She suspects foul play.

When Wyatt, Andy’s fellow researcher in the Arctic, discovers a scientific impossibility­—a young girl frozen in the ice who thaws out alive, speaking a language no one understands—Val is his first call. Will she travel to the frozen North to meet this girl, and try to comprehend what she is so passionately trying to communicate? Under the auspices of helping Wyatt interpret the girl’s speech, Val musters every ounce of her courage and journeys to the Artic to solve the mystery of her brother’s death.

The moment she steps off the plane, her fear threatens to overwhelm her. The landscape is fierce, and Wyatt, brilliant but difficult, is an enigma. But the girl is special, and Val’s connection with her is profound. Only something is terribly wrong; the child is sick, maybe dying, and the key to saving her lies in discovering the truth about Wyatt’s research. Can his data be trusted? And does it have anything to do with how and why Val’s brother died? With time running out, Val embarks on an incredible frozen odyssey—led by the unlikeliest of guides—to rescue the new family she has found in the most unexpected of places.

53. The Circle - Dave Eggers

Audio read by Dion Graham

11 unabridged cds; 14 hours

2013 Random House Audio

491 pgs.

Adult CRF (I guess....)

Finished 11/25/2013

Goodreads Rating:  3.59

My Rating: It was okay (2) 

TPPL

Setting: Just outside San Francisco

1^st sentence/s:  "My God, Mae thought.  It's heaven.  The campus was vast and rambling, wild with Pacific color, and yet the smallest detail had been carefully considered, shaped by the most eloquent hands." 

Beginning Quote:  "There wasn't any limit, no boundary at all, to the future.  And it would be so a man wouldn't have room to store his happiness." -- John Steinbeck

My comments:  Well.  I'm not really sure what I thought of this book.  At times I was incredibly bored.  At other times I was incredibly pissed. Good books get strong reactions, but what is a good book?  Good plot?  Strong reaction to the plot?  Good characterization?  Beautiful words?  I think every reader has his/her own trigger, and this book helped me think about mine.  Story...a bit tedious, ending rushed.  Writing...okay, I guess. Strong characterization...lacking.  But does it make me think? You betcha!  I'll probably remember it for a long while.  But I can't say, for me, that it was a great book....  (Mae Holland is one of the most unlikeable protagonists I've "met" in a long time....)

Goodreads Review:  When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in America—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.