Book Review: Her Frozen Wild by Kim Antieau

This story was a page turner.  It reads somewhat like a thriller that features ancient artifacts and a bit like a science fiction time travel story and a bit like magic laden fantasy but the predominant feeling throughout is that of a myth being lived out by a 20th century woman.  Which is no surprise coming from Kim Antieau whose every work I've encountered has been permeated with mythic themes.

Ursula is an archaeologist specializing in the tatoo art of the Siberian tribes circa 2500 BC.  Her mother had been an expert on cave art and had disappeared while on a cave exploration in Siberia when Ursula was quite young so she had been raised by her Grandmother who had been born and raised in the same area as those caves and the same area once traversed by the tattooed tribes before immigrating to America after WWII.

Ursula was working at a Pacific Northwest college which had sent an expedition to those same Siberian steppes and when a helicopter crash had injured members of that team trying to transport the tattooed mummy of a woman from 2500 BC which they had unearthed, Ursula was sent to aide the shorthanded team.  Before she left the states though DNA tests performed on the mummy had shown it to have Ursula's DNA.

Upon arriving in Russia she meets a man who woos her and after they become lovers she discovers he has the same tattoos as the mummy.  He hooks her up with a local shaman woman who knows the caves where Ursula's mother disappeared thirty years earlier and who agrees to take Ursula to them.  It is these caves that contain the portals through time which prove also to be the doorway to Ursula's destiny.

I truly loved this story which did not surprise me since I had loved both Jigsaw Woman and Gaia Websters by Kim Antieau that I'd checked out of the library some years back.  Antieau's stories seem to have several common threads: the profound respect for nature and a woman's seeking after the fractured pieces of her own psyche.

I was provided an ebook review copy by the author.