Frost.

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Containing both fantasy and thriller elements, Frost utilizes an unusual setting, Iqaluit, Nunavut’s territorial capital located on Baffin Island’s south coast. To tell her somewhat convoluted plot, Luiken utilizes three high school–aged narrators: Johnny Vander Zee, an orphan and aspiring junior hockey player who, with his year-younger brother, Evan, lives with relatives in Iqaluit; Cheryl Meekitjuk, Johnny’s previous girlfriend and an Inuk once addicted to gas sniffing; and Kathy O’Dwyer, Johnny’s current girlfriend and daughter of the air base’s new commanding officer.

Two happenings in Johnny’s childhood are key to the plot’s development. As a youngster, Johnny had debunked myths such as the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny, but an event had convinced him that Jack Frost really exists. Additionally, a decade ago, Johnny had been somehow involved in his parents’ automobile-related deaths. As the plot unfolds, Jack Frost, aka Frost, who Johnny believes was once an ancient god, is concerned that global warming is significantly reducing the extent of his power. To restore his control and create the next ice age, Frost decides to eliminate all humans via a global nuclear war. When North Korea invades South Korea, Frost plans to precipitate this worldwide conflict by detonating a nuclear weapon aboard a Russian plane that had crashed on an Arctic glacier during the Cold War. However, Frost requires that Johnny steal explosives from the air base to trigger the nuclear bomb.

Though readers may have many questions while working their way through the novel, Luiken does ultimately tie everything together. Recommended.