Cold Spell

by Deb Vanasse

With precise and evocative prose, Cold Spell tells the story of a mother who risks everything to start over and a daughter whose longings threaten to undo them both.

From the moment Ruth Sanders rips a glossy photo of a glacier from a magazine, she believes her fate is intertwined with the ice. Her unsettling fascination bewilders her daughter, sixteen-year-old Sylvie, still shaken by her father’s leaving. When Ruth uproots Sylvie and her sister from their small Midwestern town to follow her growing obsession—and a man—to Alaska, they soon find themselves entangled with an unfamiliar wilderness, a divided community, and one another. As passions cross and braid, the bond between mother and daughter threatens to erode from the pressures of icy compulsion and exposed secrets.
Inspired by her own experience arriving by bush plane to live on the Alaska tundra, Deb Vanasse vividly captures the reality of life in Alaska and the emotional impact of loving a remote and unforgiving land.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

224 pages, Paperback

Published August 15, 2014

About the author

Deb Vanasse is the award-winning author of 18 books of fiction and nonfiction, with a special interest in history, historical fiction, and nature. Her newest book is Roar of the Sea. She grew up in the Midwest, attended college in Northern Minnesota, and earned a Masters in the Humanities from California State/Dominguez Hills. After 36 years in Alaska, she now lives on Oregon’s north coast, enjoying beach walks with her boxer dog.

Reviews

[Stephanie Cole · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is the Alaska that most people around the world might envision, and then there’s the Alaska that you know if you’ve lived there. There is no question that Deb Vanasse has lived there. COLD SPELL is spot on accurate in its depiction of a vast landscape filled with unbelievable beauty and huge challenges. In COLD SPELL, Ruth, not long divorced, a bit bewildered and trying her best to be a good mother, becomes obsessed with a glacier near Resurrection, Alaska after she finds a picture in a magazine. When she meets and falls in love with a man from Resurrection, Ruth moves with her two daughters to the tiny, remote Alaskan town. Teenage daughter Sylvie is outraged at the abrupt uprooting, and enters into epic struggles with her mother which are typical but exacerbated by their circumstances.

The story is told through Ruth’s and Sylvie’s voices, and the two voices compel the reader to identify with both of them. Ruth is trying her best but is unprepared for the life she embraced without any realistic knowledge of what it would entail. Sylvie’s adolescent yearnings and dreams are painful, confused and vivid. Their conflicts mirror family issues that could occur anywhere, but the family’s isolation and unease with their new environment adds pressure on their difficulties.

And looming over everything is the close-by glacier, massive and alive. Vanasse uses glacial terms to name her chapters, so the characters and their actions are linked to the natural forces that form and splinter the river of ice. Very effective.

Vanasse’s prose is straightforward and accessible, and the book is a fast read. I didn’t want to put it down. I did raise a slightly skeptical eyebrow at the very final scenes (no spoilers here) but the ending is lyrical and poetic, and brings the novel to an appropriately dramatic conclusion.

If you’re interested in reading a novel that accurately depicts life in interior rural Alaska, this is the book for you.

[Wendy Mccarty · Rating 5 out of 5]

From start to finish, Cold Spell is as riveting as it is real. Descriptions, so vivid you can feel, taste, and smell the scenes, provide a back drop for the authentic, complex, and flawed people who live there. Going well beyond a trivial tale of Alaskan adventures, the author uses the rugged land and extreme conditions to shape the lives of her characters. Dreams and disappointments universal to all humans are magnified when juxtaposed against the rawness of the land. Wilderness experiences of bear hunting, fishing, and ice climbing, become symbolic of personal challenges. Conflict and resolution are expanded from the personal to include the challenges of the glacier, the river, and even the manicured lawn. Readers, though, are trusted to make these connections as the struggles of the characters become our struggles.

As an Alaskan resident of many years, the story rang true to me. I knew the people, experienced the land, and lived the emotions. Thank you, Deb Vanasse, for bringing me home!

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a great read! I was so swept up with the characters and story that I finished this book in a day, which is not typical of me. Vanasse's adept pacing and knack for tension hooked me from page one and still hasn't let go, and I finished the book last night! The two main characters's, mother and daughter, points of view criss cross throughout the novel in a masterful way. At times they contradict one another and at times they lend further insight . . . the whole thing adds a wonderful depth to the novel and the duplicity of the whole thing STILL has my head spinning! The Alaskan landscape is beautifully woven into the twining stories, the glacier a character in its own right. I highly recommend this novel.

[Efehan Elbi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having just seen that only 83 other people read Cold Spell this YEAR, I suddenly feel the need to review. I came across Cold Spell on Kobo, and couldn't have been more pleased. A grounded and beautiful novel about a family's move to Alaska, very real characters, and (for me, anyway) a glimpse of a lifestyle that I'd never really considered in detail before. A coming-of-age story in one sense, but about many other things, and one of my favourite reads (and favourite random finds) of the year.

I very much hope more than 84 people on Goodreads get the chance to read it next year.

[Roberta Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Cold Spell" makes for compulsive reading. It is a story of adventure, a glacier and life in a remote area of Alaska. A dream come true for Ruth, a divorced mom. Ruth and her two children, move from Minnesota with her boyfriend, Kenny, to his home in Alaska. Sylvie, her teenage daughter, has problems with leaving her friends and home. A great read!

[Jamie Pancake · Rating 5 out of 5]

This story sheds light on how a parent's decisions will affect her children. Ruth is a mother, who develops an unhealthy obsession with a glacier in Alaska, and as a result, clings to her boyfriend Kenny, who takes Ruth and her children to Alaska to live alongside the glacier. Sylvie, a teenager with friends she has to leave back home, is not happy with the decision, but her younger sister, who is more willing to adapt to the new surroundings, feels the opposite. Ruth struggles with whether she has made the right decision for her kids, both having a different outlook on the situation, and whether her relationship with her boyfriend, Kenny, will stand the test of time. This book is a good read, and I can relate to the characters well, being a mother as well as a child that moved around a lot.

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this book but was a bit disappointed in the ending.

[Carol Waters · Rating 4 out of 5]

A satisfying read.

I live in Texas. My son and his family live in Alaska. A few trips ago, I went to the glacier, to several really, but also to one that sounds very much like the one described in this book. A country road, an odd gift store that carried dusty junk and find-it-anywhere postcards and art prints by a local creator. On my last trip to Palmer, two weeks ago, I bought this little book.

I've thought a lot about moving to Alaska because that is where these people I enjoy are living. The questions about adapting to a new land- and on what level- are large. City or country? Country or backwoods? Could I live with a boat and a four-wheeler as my means of getting to the grocery store?

And is it worth the effort?

In this little story, a woman decides that the glacier is worth the effort. She meets a man who recognizes her glacier, and despite his flaws decides to pack up what she thinks she needs and heads north with him and her two kids. Her desire to fit in leads her to a church that is different than where she's been before, not weird perhaps but different, and to a redefinition of herself as a person. She and her daughter have a season of adjustment and then have hard choices to make about what really matters.

Here's what struck me:

The mom doesn't approach the ice. She went there to see the glacier but she doesn't do any of the obsessive things I do when I encounter something that mystifies me. She doesn't photograph it, paint it, hike on it, visit it, nothing. She gets to her goal, or what she thought was her goal, and she creates a nicer kitchen in the cabin.

The daughter doesn't approach what's his name. She thinks he wants her, sees clues, takes no action to prove or disprove her position. She thinks about him, believes things about him, does nothing.

People pretty much do what you expected them to do. That is phenomenal because we want to see huge leaps of faith or of behavior but if there's one tough lesson in life it's that we are who we are.

And at the ending I was pretty much sure that the women had each changed her mind on what to do next. One now wants to go and one now I really believe has found her place.

Life is like a glacier, I suppose, with the snows as deposits of fact and feeling and exposure to life and the slow, slow, slow advance from pressure and fracture. Me, I tend to learn from fracture. Give me a crisis and I will make some changes. Her, well, she seemed to be learning from pressure and time and slow slow movement and melt and freeze.

I look at the prints of Alaska flowers and mountains and, yes, of that glacier that hang in my home and I think about change. I realize that moving to Alaska would not mean dinner with the kids every night, or perhaps even every week, because we are who we are and they are who they are and we already have a course in our lives. I think about the changes that are happening today or might be happening. And I wonder what this woman did to steer the course.

One thing I do know is that returning to Pine Lake would be a failure. Don't do that.

[Suzanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first impression of this book is that it is beautifully written — ornate in a fashion that each sentence carries weight and literary substance. Cold Spell reads like solemn poetry with a story slipped in.

Vanasse’s knowledge of Alaskan wildlife and of its landscape and glaciers is indeed impressive. At times, the story is stalled by intelligent and detailed depictions of the untamed land. The author runs off in tangents of descriptive prose, bordering close to overload. It did not move the story forward, but instead made me stay still and admire the harsh and beautiful environment of rural Alaska.

The story harbors on universal questions about need and want, and that of unanswered longing, a longing for something as intangible as it is elusive. Unfortunately, along with the beautiful prose came paragraphs of church gatherings where a barrage of unremembered neighbors spoke of God, and a schematic-like segment on the particulars of assembling an all-terrain 8-wheeler, from gear ratios to transaxle automatic transmission. Like speed bumps, these scenes slowed the story and kept it from unfolding as fast as I would have liked it to. I was unsure why the author was so vested in feeding us this knowledge, but as a writer myself; it is with admiration that I felt the completeness of this story, in all its details.

Throughout the story, the structure of a glacier is compared to life with its enormity, hardness, dangers and cracks. Vanasse wove a tale that is profound and deep, and as a reader, I was forced to be patient and follow her story at its deliberate, methodical pace. This was a book I had to slow down to read. There is no rushing Cold Spell. For my patience, I was rewarded with a story that is rich and substantial.

[Melinda Brasher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an absorbing story, and the feelings of isolation—not just geographical—are palpable.

Being quite obsessed with Alaska at the moment, I find the portrait of this particular rural Alaskan community very interesting, though I actually enjoyed the first half of the book more. Perhaps this is because I identified so strongly with the mother and her magazine picture. Then, when she got to Alaska, her reaction surprised me and I found myself disconnecting a little. But this is all part of the complexity of the characters, and Deb Vanasse did a great job at it. I had a hard time keeping a few of the minor characters straight, since so many were introduced together, but that didn’t detract much from the story.

The style is very literary, very introspective. It’s thus a little slow, but in a good way, a deep way. Some of the prose has the feel of poetry to it. Like much poetry, individual bits may not be clear, cloaked in metaphor and hiding things between the lines, but all together they create a cohesive whole that beautifully conveys the atmosphere and the emotions of the characters.

The ending isn’t tied up in a bow, which is realistic and literary, but I needed just a bit more closure, even if it wasn’t happy. I want to know what was going to happen to these characters I care about, and what final decisions they’re going to make.

Cold Spell was a very good read, and I look forward to more of Deb Vanasse’s work.


*I received an advanced reading copy in exchange for an honest review*

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully crafted, the words and images of COLD SPELL spill over like glacial water. The book moves in delicious chunks, from the twisty relationship nuances of a divorced mom and her school-age girls, to the languid pace of a wholly different life in Alaska. Deb Vanasse describes the cold waters, ice and glaciers in this rugged land with such vivid detail that the place becomes its own character. She weaves color into the sameness of the locale through the quirks of its inhabitants. From the Bible studying women, girl-chasing teens to Ruth’s sassy neighbor Tommy, Vanasse observes without judging, how people in an almost too-close community don’t forget each other’s history and how insularity can create an edge of menace.

Once Ruth moves with her daughters to Alaska, the pace of the story slows, perhaps purposefully, mirroring the pace of life in a place known for its frigidity. The characters build little by little, leaving you wondering about their inner motivations. The man Ruth’s met through mutual admiration of a glacier, Kenny. Ruth’s older daughter, Sylvie – how far will a bored teen go to rebel?

A literary work, the story is not propelled forward by plot. Rather, read this book for the beauty of language.

I was given a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Samaris Creech · Rating 4 out of 5]

After the abrupt departure of her husband Ruth is just trying to make a life for herself and her girls. She finds herself fascinated with a picture of a glacier she finds in a magazine and even goes so far as to frame it. If one were to believe in fate then one could say that the day Kenny walked into Ruth’s life was fate’s intention. For Kenny’s home is where the glacier she has been obsessing over is. When Ruth makes the decision to move to Alaska with Kenny she does so with the best of intentions. Sylvie her oldest daughter who is still struggling with the loss of her father is crushed by the news that they will be leaving the only home she has ever known. Sylvie is also struggling with adolescent yearnings of her own and is quite put off by the move. This is a riveting tale that will keep you reading the characters are well thought out and the author has a way of making you feel like you are actually in the rural of Alaska yourself. Join Ruth and Sylvie on their journey.

[Susan McBeth (Adventures by the Book) · Rating 4 out of 5]

In alternating voices, Deb Vanasse unfolds the story of Ruth Sanders, a divorced Midwestern mother, and her teen daughter Sylvie, reeling from her father's recent abandonment. Believing her fate is connected to a glacier pictured in a magazine she has framed on her desk, she unexpectedly uproots Sylvie and younger sister Anna to follow a man to Alaska in search of the glacier she believes will fulfill an unexplained longing in her. While Anna is young enough to go with the flow, Sylvie, on the other hand, asserts her teenage rebellion and takes every opportunity to rebel in their new life. And when Sylvie makes a choice that could have devastating consequences, Ruth is forced to confront what that glacier really represents for her family. I love discovering talented new authors, and would highly recommend Cold Spell for others who wish to do the same.

[T. Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a resident of Alaska, I can testify to the authenticity of this story. Like many people who wind up in this state, Ruth, the adult protagonist moves north because of a fascination with the far north. You either love or hate Alaska, and Ruth's daughter, Sylvie, knows she is going to hate it and then proves herself right. The depiction of small, remote community is spot on, including the conflict between the two factions typically attracted to rural Alaska (the conservative religious and the misfit iconoclasts). If you want to read about the real Alaska, read this book. It will either make you want to come to Alaska or run fast the other way--but no matter what, you will be fascinated by this absorbing story, caught up in the compelling descriptions of the landscape, and dazzled by Vanasse's prose.

[Christy · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book just went on & on. Not much happened. The mother obsesses over a picture of a glacier. She meets a guy from Alaska that lives near the glacier. She leaves everything she has in Minnesota to go to Alaska with this guy she met that she likes. She takes her 2 daughter.s. One is in high school doesn't like this at all but the elementary school age one does. They start to try to fit in that summer in rural Alaska. The older daughter tried to run away back to Minnesota & fails. An acquaintance dies. They spread her ashes on the glacier. The mother has second thoughts about moving up there. That it. A better ending would at least tell us if they stayed in Alaska or moved back to Minnesota after the summer.

[Jean · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a strange tale about a woman and her two daughters who are grieving the loss of life as they had known it. Ruth's husband leaves her for another woman and the daughters learn a new version of the father they loved. Ruth becomes obsessed with the picture in a magazine of a glacier. She learns all she can about glaciers. Eventually, Kenny comes into her life through happenstance and he just happens to have a home next to the glacier. Ruth packs up the girls and off they go with Kenny to Alaska. The story is about Ruth and the girls coming to terms with a new life. It is a strange story.

[Carol N · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is risking everything to start over worth it? This is one of the major themes of Vanasse's coming of age, wilderness tale - "Cold Spell.' Having found myself lately, enchanted with reading about our most northern state, Alaska, and the hardships of living off the grid, I found this novel, a slice of Alaska one rarely sees. It is a story of a young mother and her two daughters, born and raised in the Midwest and lured to the Far North by ragtag lover and a glacier that the mother believes will fulfill her unexplained longing. The story is real, its riveting,and filled with descriptions you can feel, taste and smell.

[Haley Sumrall · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this book free for review thanks to Goodreads Firstreads Giveaways.
I loved the very vivid descriptions in this book of Alaska and it's natural beauty. There were a few plot twists along the way but not many. This is the story of obsession and how one person's decision can change a family. Ruth longs to move to Alaska after becoming obsessed with a glacier she saw in a magazine, but her teenage daughter does not want to leave her friends behind. This was definitely not my favorite book, but it wasn't the worst one I've read either. I give it 3 out of 5 stars.

[Forever Young Adult]

Graded By: Brian
Cover Story: Below that Ol' White Mountain, Just a Little Southeast of Nome
Drinking Buddy: No Running Water
Testosterone/Estrogen Level: Epic Beard
Talky Talk: Here's the Story of a Lovely Lady, Who Was Bringing Up Two Very Lovely Girls
Bonus Factors: Alaska, Lolita Wanna Be
Bromance Status: That Dude I Knew That Summer I Worked in Valdez

Read the full book report here.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cold Spell is a cautionary tale about acting on an obsession. The pace is crisp but not breakneck, the descriptions unique in a place few have experienced, and there are a few surprises that kept me reading. Though it doesn't describe itself as such, it feels to me like a young adult novel. Plenty of teens would recognise themselves in some of the characters, as would young adults making their way in the world.

[RK · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll echo what other reviewers state: the scenery is spot on. The secondary characters are also dead ringers for a lot of the people I've met living here.
I do thank my lucky stars we relocated to Alaska with a 13 year old. This book further solidifies our decision to move before he started high school!

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally, a novel set in Alaska describing it as it is. No romanticizing. Accurate depiction of bush community split between Christians and "free spirits." I did not care for either of the protagonists, but it's their wacky expectations that drive the plot.

[monica seiger · Rating 1 out of 5]

Promise of a good book

The premise of the book sounded interesting. I thought it held promise of an interesting read in the beginning of the book. As the story continued it went from entertaining to boring every day issues.

[Carole · Rating 1 out of 5]

I tried to read this a year ago or so, but I found it rather boring and this time as well. I tried to skip over the religious part but I still found it not interesting to me, and I quit reading it.

[Amy Hobby]

Don't recommend. Good enough to keep me interested, but kept expecting it to get better.

[Gloria Quackenbush · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uneven

The writing was very uneven, and the point of the story and eluded me. I would not recommend this book to anyone.

[Beatrice P · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mother decides to live the rugged country life in Alaska. Lovely descriptions of the Alaska landscape and emotional and sensual at times.