Ice Dogs
By Terry Lynn Johnson
MG, Adventure
Lost.
That’s how the fourteen-year-old dogsledder Victoria Secord has felt ever since her father died. A champion musher, Victoria is independent, self-reliant, and, thanks to her father, an expert in surviving the unforgiving Alaskan bush. When an injured “city boy” and a freak snowstorm both catch Victoria and her dog team by surprise, however, a routine trip becomes a life-or-death trek through the frozen wilderness. As temperatures drop and food stores run out, Victoria must find a way to save them all.
oOo
Of course spending a few months in Alaska working with dogs I had to pick up a book about sled dogs. If you have someone in your life who’s interested in mushing then I would highly recommend this book. The author did the leg work to make this book authentic. The commands and equipment used and even Victoria’s attitude toward her dogs are very true to life. There are a couple of moments of artistic licensing, like when Victoria falls off the sled but manages to catch up to them and gracefully hop on the runners. When I told the mushers about that scene they all laughed. Dogs are great, but they will 100% leave your ass if you fall off.
Victoria is a headstrong and stubborn character. Sometimes she reads like she has something to prove, but nothing concrete ever comes up. She’s well received and respected in the mushing community as a great young musher, so it’s not the usual “woman must prove her place” trope that this could have fallen in to.
Victoria is pretty messed up from her dad’s death just shy of a year prior. Her dad is the one that taught Victoria to run dogs and how to survive out on the trail and that was their thing. Her mom is categorically uninterested in dogs and that puts the two at odds. That’s a problem, because Victoria wants to go look at some more dogs from another musher who’s getting out of them, but her mom doesn’t want to drive her there. So Victoria, in all of her teenage righteousness, decides to take herself there using her own dog team while her mom is at work.
Now, first off, if she found a dog, how was she going to get it back? Second, she was born and raised in Alaska, it’s late winter/early spring, but she doesn’t even bother to look at the weather before undertaking this journey. Third, she’s never taken a team over to this musher’s house and plots a vague course on how she thinks she can get there and packs according to that.
This is where the book started to lose me.
You can’t set this character up as someone who knows how to run dogs and survive in the bush and then have her make these huge oversights. I can understand the hubris that lead her to packing for her trip based on what she assumed her team could do. But not checking the weather? Again, it’s late winter/early spring in Alaska and she’s going on a thirty-five mile run with her dogs through unfamiliar territory.
Our “city boy,” Chris, is pretty much a stock character of “fish out of water” trope He’s from Toronto who just moved to the area four days ago. He is the physical manifestation of “If things continue to get worse, I’ll have to ask you to stop helping.” Literally everything he touches just bursts into flames. I wasn’t really sold on his character and their friendship arc felt a little stiff.
Overall, this is a good story. It’s full of action and it’s tearful towards the end when Victoria finally accepts that her dad’s death was an accident and no power on Earth could have saved him.
I would recommend Ice Dogs for anyone who enjoys adventure and action.
You can find Ice Dogs by Terry Lynn Johnson at:
And learn more about the author at her website
Forever Fiction Books 