Adult contemporary fiction about forgiveness, courage, and redemption disguised as a family drama about a couple who owns an ice factory. Contains one of the most well-drawn set of characters in a book I’ve read this year. One of the secondary characters, Chemal, is among my all-time favorites. Even the dog had a unique personality.

The story revolves around the factory owners, who are currently facing impending brain surgery and business-ending OSHA fines. In addition, difficult family relationships abound, such as a father with dementia and an adult son recovering from heroin addiction. The author transports the reader to both Jacksonville, Florida, and Loch Linnhe, Scotland, through her articulate descriptions. The author’ writing style enables the plot to flow seamlessly, and her use of imagery brings the scenes to life. I highly recommended this book to those who enjoy well-drawn characters and stories of family relationships. Also recommended to book clubs and those who appreciate intelligent fiction.

I received an advance copy of this e-book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for a candid review. This book will be released December 5, 2017. ( )

Enjoyable Read ( )

This story takes place in Jacksonville, Florida, and Loch Linnhe, Scotland. Johnny MacKinnon and his wife Pauline run an ice factory in Jacksonville that had belonged to Pauline’s father, Packy Knight. Pauline is the CEO, and Johnny is the COO. Pauline has renamed the ice making and distribution company Bold City Ice. We find out early in the story that the company has an ongoing OSHA investigation because of an ammonia tank rupture. The MacKinnons have hired a well-known law firm to defend them. They try to prove that the tank was not in disrepair but that Leonard, a neighbor in the Little Silver neighborhood where the factory is located, illegally scaled the fence and used the anhydrous ammonia to make meth.

As the investigation is heating up and the MacKinnons are preparing their defense, Johnny is diagnosed with a brain cyst that could be a tumor, and he needs brain surgery. The doctor orders him to stay home and rest. In anticipation of a dire outcome, Johnny decides to visit his son Corran, who lives with his first wife, Sharon, in Scotland. Corran is a heroin addict, and the last time he visited Johnny in Florida, they parted on bad terms with Johnny, saying that he wanted Corran out of his life. Of course, the doctor is not aware of this plan, and Pauline is not happy that her husband is both risking his life and leaving her alone to run Bold City Ice and deal with the OSHA issue.

Since Johnny cannot drive, he hires a teenaged neighbor, Chemal, to drive him around Jacksonville and then decides to bring him along to Scotland to act as his chauffeur from the airport to Sharon’s house and then to visit Corran in a more remote part of Scotland, Loch Linnhe. Chemal is a charming character who is probably on the autism spectrum since he struggles with prosody and communication issues. I was interested in how the author showed Johnny interacting with Chemal, sometimes more patiently than he did with his own son, Carron. Johnny was a memorable protagonist overall. He wasn’t necessarily insightful about his communication style. Still, we got to see him interact with his wife, ex-wife, her husband, the two youngsters in the story, and the doctors and workers in the ice factory. His methods for navigating relationships provide much material for reflection and discussion.

I was not impressed with the way Smith portrayed women in this book. Pauline, the CEO is not a strong female leader; she seems more interested in traditional and trite female issues than improving and saving the company. Claire, a member of the administrative team of Bold City Ice, is competent but has difficulty separating her business life from her personal life. Sharon is a bit stronger as a character, but she enables her son and is a little bit too complacent about her dealings with Johnny. I think that Smith did a good job getting readers to sympathize with characters with disabilities since she included Chemal and a doctor who is in a wheelchair. Also, Carron’s character and chemical dependence are handled with sensitivity, allowing the reader to see addiction as a disease. Of course, Carron’s addiction and the addictions of people in the working-class area of the ice factory are viewed differently, and class differences are an important theme in the book.

The Ice House of the title refers not only to the physical ice factory that is central to the plot but also to the metaphorical iciness of the homes described in the narrative. Pauline avoids her father, and we learn some poignant tales about his interactions with the working-class members of the Jacksonville neighborhood when he ran the ice factory, which was then known as Knight’s Ice. What we know about Claire and Roy, other members of the management team, also speak to this theme of icy home relations. Chemal comes from a dysfunctional family that hardly cares about his well-being and whereabouts. At Corran’s house in Loch Linnhe, Scotland, there is lots of physical ice that figures prominently into the story, and the icy discourse among the characters is paramount to the story.
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Set in remote areas of Florida and Scotland with different members of a family running an ice house, my thoughts immediately turned to the well-known novel (and movie) The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux. So the bar was set high!

If I worked in the publishing industry then maybe I could put my finger on why I feel so ambivalent about The Ice House. Laura Lee Smith's descriptions of locations are picturesque, there are plenty of tensions and even a mystery, the main characters go through life changes and there are many unexpected events.

This is beautiful writing but I found it difficult to stay involved. The plot is wide-ranging and satisfactorily worked out but I never really warmed to most of the characters. I found it a slow read, similar to Donna Tartt's work. ( )

Johnny and Pauline MacKinnon have been married for twenty-five years; they live in Florida, where they run the ice factory which Pauline inherited from her father. When the story opens the future of the factory is under threat because, following a serious leak of ammonia at the plant, the health and safety investigation has determined that the problem was caused by poor maintenance and a massive fine has now been imposed. Johnny, adamant that no short-cuts had been taken, is convinced that the leak was caused by an act of sabotage and that he knows who was responsible. He has lodged an appeal but, unless someone in the community comes forward with proof to support his theory, the factory will have to close, throwing all the employees out of work.
Johnny was originally from Scotland, where he had married Sharon, his first wife, when they were both very young. They stayed together for a few years after their son, Corran, was born but various stresses resulted in her meeting and falling in love with Toole and, subsequently, their mutual decision to separate. Out of work in Scotland, Johnny accepted the offer of a job at the Florida factory, where he fell in love with Pauline. However, he maintained a good relationship with Sharon and continued to support his son, who always spent his holidays in Florida. In his teens Corran started to take drugs, eventually becoming addicted to heroin. Johnny and Pauline paid for several expensive rehab courses, re-mortgaging their home to pay for the final one.
When the story starts Johnny is 30 years old, living a drug-free life in an isolated area of Scotland and, separated from his imprisoned, drug-addicted partner, is now a single parent, bringing up Lucy, his nine-month-old daughter. However, following the disappearance of Pauline’s wedding ring, which Johnny believes was taken by Corran to raise money for drugs, he hasn’t spoken to his son for almost a year and has never seen his granddaughter. When Johnny collapses on the factory floor, medical tests reveal that he has a brain tumour and surgery is scheduled for two weeks later. This catastrophic news makes Johnny reflect on what the future might hold. Realising that this pre-surgery time offers him the opportunity to build bridges with Corran and to meet his baby granddaughter, he decides to return to Scotland.
Although I had been attracted to this story when I read the opening chapters on the “First Impression”, Readers First site, I wasn’t prepared for the way in which I would feel so compellingly engrossed in the lives of the characters, and the dilemmas and conflicts each of them faced. Once I had started to read I was reluctant to put the book down until I had finished it – then when I had finished it, I felt bereft of their company! The author’s skill at creating multi-dimensional characters was demonstrated throughout her story-telling, with each one feeling credible, no matter whether they played a major or a minor role.
The story is told mainly through Johnny’s eyes but with enough input from the other characters to add a rich and convincing dimension to the development of the plot. He and Pauline didn’t have children of their marriage, although she feels very close to Corran, and one of the strands followed is her reflections on her childlessness when she is facing the possibility of a future without Johnny. The reader also follows her as she attempts to come to terms with the fact that her wealth and privilege has been derived from her father’s ruthless exploitation of his workers, as well as his violence and racism. Having refused to fully examine or challenge these unacceptable attitudes in the past, she now finds it difficult to resolve them because he has developed dementia.
In Scotland Sharon, a hospice nurse and breast cancer survivor, continues to struggle as she works full time, spends weekends helping Corran (who lives a three-hour drive away) with baby-sitting her granddaughter whilst he works extra shifts on the local ferry. At the same time, she is having to deal with the realisation that Toole, her husband, is in the early stages of dementia. The exploration of the pressures she faced on a daily basis made me feel exhausted on her behalf!
Corran is very realistically portrayed as an addict who is constantly having to struggle to resist the lure of drugs. The destructive effects that his addiction has had on his relationships was well captured; there were moments when the moving descriptions of the difficulties he and his father had in trying to communicate with each other almost had me in tears.
Following the diagnosis of the brain tumour Johnny is told that he mustn’t drive, so he recruits Chemal, the seventeen-year-old son of his neighbours, to drive him around. Although he doesn’t yet have a license, the teenager proves to be an excellent driver and when Johnny decides to go to Scotland, he takes Chemal with him. I came to love Chemal, a very smart but socially-challenged young man, who has parents who appear to show little interest in him. He has been excluded from school because of his struggles with boundaries and authority and his inability to speak quietly leads to some occasionally moving, occasionally hilarious, interactions. I really enjoyed the relationship which developed between Johnny and Chemal, with the “second-chances” it offered each of them.
In addition to the characters I have already mentioned, there isn’t one secondary character who doesn’t leap off the page as a result of the author’s ability to describe simple interchanges using highly evocative word-pictures. The authenticity of her perceptive portrayals of each of her flawed, complex characters is one of the real strengths of this novel, as is the way in which she demonstrates the insights and strengths they gain as they confront their demons. Her descriptions of the steamy heat of Florida with the frigid cold of the ice factory, of frantic urban Glasgow and the comparison with rural Scotland, add another evocative dimension to the story.
Much as I enjoyed this book, there are two factors which influenced my decision to give it a four, rather than a five, star rating. I think that the final section of the story felt a little too rushed and, whilst some of the resolutions felt realistic and credible, others bordered on offering too much of a fairy-tale ending which, given the nature of most of the rather more “gritty” writing, came as a something of a surprise.

My thanks to Grove Press and Readers First for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. ( )