Out of the Ice

Out of the Ice (2016)
by Ann Turner

So, I received an advance copy of this book (it'll be properly released in June 2016) in exchange for an honest review. While this was terribly exciting, it also left me a little conflicted... To be honest, I don't really do book reviews. I just do recommendations for books that I like. After the first chapter of Out of the Ice, I was starting to wonder whether it would be ok to change my blog's title to Fifty Good Books... and One Painfully Mediocre One.
However, if you happen to be reading Out of the Ice and find yourself tempted to give up on it; just keep going. After a few chapters, the uninspired writing resolves itself into something kind of interesting. By half way, you'll be finding it quite difficult to put down. By the three-quarter mark, you may well find that you're still awake at 1am because you simply must finish this book. Possibly that's just me. But if you're looking for a genuinely enjoyable page-turner, Out of the Ice is well worth a go.

Out of the Ice is largely set on a tiny Antarctic island, where environmental scientist Laura Alvarado has been sent to check out an historic, long-abandoned whaling settlement, to assess the potential environmental  impact of opening up the township to visitors (it's been an exclusion zone for decades, to protect the unique local wildlife). Dedicated to the protection of whales, Laura is fairly unsettled by her time in the whaling village, where there are plenty of reminders of its nasty past - abandoned butchery sheds, giant barrels for boiling blubber, even whale skeletons on the beach. On top of that, the penguins and seals in the area are behaving very strangely and the scientists stationed at the nearby base are acting like a weirdly secretive boys' club. When Laura starts to find signs of habitation in the long-abandoned township, she can't be sure whether she's stumbled onto something terrible, or whether she's starting to lose touch with reality after so long in Antarctica. As things get weirder, the suspense builds towards a satisfyingly explosive ending.

A real-life abandoned whaling station, complete with creepy whale-slaughtering machinery

There's a piece of advice often given to aspiring authors, that you should always "show, not tell". A great author doesn't talk you through a character's back story - it should be more subtle than that. Instead they drop little details throughout the text so that information reveals itself over time. In the first chapter of Out of the Ice, Ann Turner does far too much telling. For example, Laura's friend Kate is "A lanky 185 centimetres tall, thirty-three years old, she was pale skinned and freckled, with a shock of unruly red hair that shimmered in the sun". Why step in as the author to tell us directly what she looks like? Why not let this reveal itself through conversations between Laura and Kate, or observations made by other characters? The author then spends far too long dwelling on Laura's past relationships, her family, her job placement... It's all just a bit unpolished and clunky.
I know this is a bit picky. There are many, many authors (Lee Child and Nelson DeMille spring to mind) who write equally awkward passages and are still hugely successful because they are so good at writing a good page-turner. The reason I found this particularly frustrating in Out of the Ice is that it's so close to be much more than another likable page-turner .

Adelie penguins are pretty awesome, as it turns out.

Out of the Ice has a fabulously unique setting in Antarctica. There are penguins and seals and whales. There are snowstorms and high-tech science labs and this fantastic whaling village, apparently abandoned overnight and preserved in 1963 forever more. It's inventive and different - it's a great place to start a story. Ann Turner is also very, very good at describing these surreal scenes : "Icebergs studding the bay shone blue and white, with deep green shadows. Adelies huddled at the edges peered nervously into the sea - then the group jittered and pushed one lone penguin into the water. Checking to see it hadn't been eaten by a leopard seal, the rest followed in a fluid movement" . These passages really set Out of the Ice apart as something a little different, which is very cool.

There are plenty of surprises, a healthy dose of suspense and some genuinely lovely writing in Out of the Ice. It's a solid, extremely readable thriller - a very good book that was almost a great one.

7/10