First Light by Rebecca Stead

So I finally got around to reading First Light, and I really enjoyed it!  It’s funny because I recently read a young adult book called Ice by Sarah Beth Durst that is also set in the Arctic, and the descriptions in Durst’s book were so beautiful that at first I kind of missed that in First Light, but the excitement of the two stories doesn’t compare.  First Light is told in the alternating voices of Peter, a 12-year-old boy growing up in New York who’s about to go with his parents on an expedition to Greenland (his father is a glaciologist); and Thea who lives in a hidden world under the ice in Greenland, her people driven there generations ago by the English, who accused them of being witches.  Of course you know these two are destined to meet.  Peter’s mother has been hiding something from him for years, with her mysterious red notebook that she writes fanatically in whenever she has one of her “headaches,” and the whispered conversations with Peter’s father about searching for something in Greenland.  Both stories are engaging and suspenseful, and the world that Stead creates under the ice is fascinating. Review by Stacy Church