A Line in the Ice had a great concept that paid off well conceptually but not at all in terms of character. I ended up not caring about the romance because by the end of the book I disliked the two major characters. There were things about the book that I loved (the concept, the setting, the character of Lysander for the first half of the book) and things I didn’t. I’m giving the book a ‘C’ grade because it seems a fair average given that I loved and disliked approximately equal portions of the book.

The premise of A Line in the Ice is both simple and complex. In simple terms, star-crossed lovers save the planet. Here’s a more detailed plot description courtesy of Carina Press:

Bloodthirsty monsters are emerging from the Antarctic ice, the same creatures that once stalked the battlegrounds of World War I. Back then, a group of soldiers valiantly fought off the beasts–and were never seen again. A century later, an elite military squad stands between civilization and the mysterious return of the enemy.

Captain Charlie Weller thinks she’s seen everything–until a man crawls out onto the ice, barely alive and muttering about a place called Illyria. Lysander Davies claims to be the descendant of one of the missing soldiers. He insists the monsters are actually gentle creatures, under the control of beings far, far more dangerous…

Drawn to the stranger, Charlie believes his stories and agrees to help him. But they both know nothing can come of their feelings for one another, for the only way to save earth is for Lysander to return to Illyria and close the rift behind him, forever…

 

Any story about Antarctica has to convey a sense of menace form the elements, a sense of isolation, and a sense of vastness. This story does a good job conveying the vastness and the disorientation caused by constant daylight. There’s also a lot of discussion about supplies being limited. Some of the conversation about cold didn’t ring true to what I’ve read about current day Antarctic life, but it fit the premise of a group that is underfunded and supplied. For instance, they talk about how you can’t stay outside for very long, even though in reality people often spend all day working outside, even in winter. The station in the book is cold enough that people feel chilly all the time, and in real life, at least at McMurdo Station, rooms are kept as warm as the occupants wish. These details took me out of the story a little because I found them unrealistic, but they also fit the basic premise.

As far as characters go, they’re all very undeveloped. There’s the group pet, the group bully, the doctor, the peacemaking one, and the daredevil dashing pilot (Charlie, our heroine, who is also something of a team pet). Even Charlie is pretty one-dimensional – she’s dashing and she’s nice – but she’s really only nice to Lysander. She’s quite self-centered when it comes to the rest of her team.

Which brings us to Lysander. He makes his appearance as an emotionally and physically wounded hero. I just love that kind of hero. He gets frustrated with Charlie’s team but on the whole he behaves sensibly with them, and is mostly non-threatening and patient. I loved Lysander because for the first part of the book he’s huggable (he’s very sad), respectful of Charlie’s capabilities, and a good communicator, given the cultural barriers. He speaks English, but it’s English from the WWI Era so most of the slang and modern terms that Charlie says to him are incomprehensible. For the first half of the book, I loved Lysander, I liked Charlie, and I was very interested in the story and how these two star-crossed lovers could possibly work things out.  The history behind the rift was fascinating and that alone carried me along for a while – it was just such a fun concept.

Then the team encounters an Aquorian. The Aquorians “use their power to open rifts to travel from world to world, attacking and destroying until there’s nothing left.” When the team decides to imprison the Aquorian instead of executing it outright, Lysander completely loses his shit. He fights with the team about trying to keep the Aquorian prisoner. He sneaks into the cell. And then, I’m not kidding, he beats the prisoner to death with his bare hands.

What the actual hell. Everyone is mad because of the loss of intelligence, but no one has an ethical problem with the fact that Lysander just murdered a sentient being. Of course it makes sense that Lysander would feel both terror and rage in the face of a member of a race that killed everyone Lysander knew, especially when the prisoner mocks Lysander’s grief and threatens his new friends and girlfriend (the Aquarion’s sole personality trait is ‘evil’). There’s also the fact that Lysander believes that the Aquorians can’t be contained and will inevitably kill all of Lysander’s new friends. That doesn’t change the fact that Lysander murdered a sentient being who, at the beginning of the fight, was unarmed and chained. Lysander and the Aquorian were both unarmed, so it’s a brutal, prolonged, graphic and gory beating. There are no consequences for this and the only reasons people are angry with Lysander are practical ones. No one says, “Hey, it’s not OK to murder prisoners, FYI.”

The Aquorians are sentient beings that have no character, no motivation, and no backstory. I find it ugly and offensive when a book or film says, “Hey, these are the villains. Why are they villains? Because I said so. They are just plain bad, so you never have to feel bad about anything that happens to them or wonder about underlying causes. They are nothing but objects of hate.” In a book that is on the whole fairly realistic about the traumas of war, it’s irresponsible to treat the enemy as nothing but cannon fodder. Worse, it’s boring. That’s why zombie stories tend to be more about tensions between humans than the actual zombies – zombies create interesting situations and dilemmas, but the zombies themselves are boring.

Contrast this approach with the aliens in Aliens. The aliens are single-minded and seemingly without empathy, and they are not beings we can communicate with or know much about. But they do have some personality. The Alien Queen is a character, not a caricature. The mysterious nature of the aliens makes them scary (as does all those teeth and acid blood and the spiky tails and their unsavory means of reproduction), but their personality (at least, the Queen’s personality) makes them interesting (see the scene in which Ripley and the Queen have a showdown over the Queen’s eggs and they communicate with teeth, a flamethrower, and some meaningful head-tilting).

I digress.  Back to the book.  After that point, Lysander is stubborn, confusing, impatient, and irrational. If this were presented critically, the story could be a very compelling one about trauma, but it’s not. We seem to be intended to agree with Lysander even though frankly he’s acting like a butthead. Meanwhile Charlie spends all her time having sex with Lysander and completely ignores her work and her team. There’s a lot of conversation about how the military team is a family, but I didn’t see it. They seem barely connected to each other. I expected that as the book went on, the characters would become more layered and their interactions with each other would reveal their relationships. But very little of that happens. While the sex scenes are fine, the book could have done with half the sex scenes and twice the character development.

I didn’t hate the book, except for the out of the blue brutal and very graphic murder with no consequences, which I hated A LOT.  But I did feel let down by the fact the book stops going anywhere. Lysander turns into a jerk, Charlie is a bit of a jerk as well, and until the big battle sequence at the end (which is truly exciting and which leads to some great scenes) not much happens in the middle section of the story. It was an interesting concept that didn’t quite pay off.