Ice Out: A Novel

Written by Susan Speranza

Narrated by Peg Barcelo

A powerful tale of one woman’s desperate journey from grief to acceptance and forgiveness after an accident shatters her life.

Francesca Bodin has a near-perfect life as an accomplished music teacher and professional flutist living in the country 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 escapes, leaving her and Addie behind 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 struggles to emerge 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Susan Speranza
• Release date: Apr 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669676935

Susan Speranza

Susan Speranza was born in New York City, grew up on Long Island, and went to college and for a time worked in Manhattan. For years she enjoyed the hectic pace and cultural amenities of the City, but after a great upheaval, she escaped the urban/suburban jungle and claimed her piece of the country in Vermont, where she has now lived happily for more than twenty years. In between the demands of life, she’s authored two other books: The City of Light, a dystopian story about the end of Western civilization, and The Tale of Lucia Grandi, The Early Years, a novel about a dysfunction suburban family. She’s also published numerous articles, poems, and short stories. Along the way, she managed to collect a couple of master’s degrees. When she is not writing, she keeps herself busy exhibiting and breeding her champion Pekingese.

Reviews for Ice Out

[Amanda · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Okay let's go. I listened to the audiobook for the history, and my initial thought on it was that the first two acts of the book are pretty complex. The time shift, the flashbacks, are somewhat difficult to distinguish from the current time period. Both Francesca's part and Ben's part. I don't know if in the physical book these time changes are better marked so that they are easier to understand. I can only say that this greatly hindered my enjoyment of the story. The part where Francesca is trying to save herself and her daughter is the most interesting part of the first acts, I don't know if her past and things from her childhood are so relevant to the story. In the case of Ben's section, his past is somehow more relevant to try to understand why he had a certain attitude, however it didn't make me like him as a person, even knowing his reasons. The third act, came out of nowhere. Which was a nice surprise, but it was also very fast. That moment in the forest, the search for the daughter, the fear and the regret for the situation, happened very quickly, and could have been worked on a lot more. There was a lot missing in that last act to really make you want to understand the characters in the forest, to understand what was happening in that situation. The suspense and mystery of the opening scene was good, but it went by so fast that it was a bit incomprehensible. Who are these characters? Who is the white widow? Who is the second oldest character Francesca meets near the house? What is her reason for appearing? What is the point of these characters existing? So that last part of the story should have been two-thirds of the story instead of a quarter. The time the author spent explaining and going back in Francesca's past and childhood could have been cut in half and expanded the forest scene. My final thoughts regarding the book are: The concept is good, but the practice is not very good. Three-quarters of the story was spent developing something that I thought was unnecessary, and what could have been the best part of the story was left out and passed too quickly.