Frozen by Mary Casanova

Mary Casanova is a prolific Minnesotan children's author whose works range from picture books to historical fiction. She is, however, not well-known here in Finland. Our library does not have any of her books and I haven't heard of her before I found her novel Frozen while browsing the NetGalley website. I cannot quite recall what it was with Frozen that caught my eye. Maybe it was the somehow haunting cover or the mystery promised with the few lines of text introducing the story or maybe just the fact that it was set in the 1920s. What ever the reason I ended up requesting the novel. I had some other books to read before Frozen and when I finally got to it I had forgotten what it was all about. Instead of logging in NetGalley or surfing the net to refresh my memory I decided to delve into the story straightaway, in a way blindly, without any expectations or knowledge of what may come.

In Frozen Mary Casanova tells the story of Sadie Rose, a sixteen year old girl, who has not been able to speak since she was found nearly frozen to death in show some eleven years earlier, the same night her mother, a prostitute, was found dead. When Sadie Rose accidentaly finds some old photographs that she realises are pictures of her mother, snippets of old memories start to haunt her. What really happened to her mother? Why did she end up into a brothel? Who was she?

Frozen is a compelling story. Eventhough Sadie Rose  herself is a fictional character, Casanova has included into the story some real historical events and based some of the main characters into real historical figures. I always enjoy this kind of mixing of facts and fiction, real and fictional characters, when done well -and Casanova manages the feat very nicely indeed! Almost a character of its own is the North Minnesotan nature, but that is no surprise as Casanova herself lives in Minnesota near the Canadian border. She actually used her own 100-year-old home as a model for the cottage the Worthingtons (the couple who took care of Sadie Rose after her mother's death) spent their summers in! 

My only critisism is that sometimes the plot felt a bit too simple to me as an adult reader. I especially found it hard to believe that Sadie Rose was able to get away and travel unnoticed as much as she did. But this is only a minor critisism. All in all I really enjoyed reading Frozen. Almost missed my stop one day when I was reading it in the metro!

Take a look at the Frozen book trailer here:

As a sidenote I must say that the nature in the trailer looks so typically Finnish that no wonder many Finns emigrated to Minnesota in the past!

Here is a little video of Mary Casanova telling about her work as a children's author: