Wardini Book review: To the Ice - Thomas Tidholm and Anna-Clara Tidholm (Gecko Press, $27.99)

To the Ice, by Thomas Tidholm and Anna-Clara Tidholm, leaves readers dreaming of a young trio of adventurers.

OPINION

To the Ice is an illustrated story for young children. In it, Ida relates a story which to this day, a day in which I think she is an adult looking back, she doesn’t quite know how to describe.

All she can tell you is that one winter’s day, she, Jack and Max were playing by the creek when the piece of ice on which they stood separated and floated away, taking them to the sea, and eventually through pack ice to a frozen land, in which they found a cabin.

It’s an adventure story, one with immediate action and danger. They’re children and are scared, but they also show curiosity (there’s pack ice and an aurora) and resilience (they all have a good cry at the same time so they can all then be quiet and get some sleep).

It’s told simply, in a matter-of-fact, gentle tone with a smattering of sophisticated language appropriate for the now-grown narrator: the ice floe drifts ‘almost elegantly,’ and there’s a lot of ‘debris’ at the start of their adventure. Children love words if the person reading to them loves words, let them chew over ‘aurora’ and get lost in the picture.

The book is dedicated to Fridtjof Nansen and Ernest Shackleton. Nansen was an explorer, the first to cross the interior of Greenland, and a Nobel Peace Prize winner for his work with persons displaced after World War I.

A page in the adventures of Ida, Jack and Max details a moment in which Ida thinks they might die in a storm; it’s easy to make connections with refugees in 2023.

There’s another moment where Ida reads a diary or captain’s log left in the cabin written by Lars Iversen, an explorer. I looked him up, but I don’t think he’s real. Nansen and Shackleton are, though, so there’s plenty to follow up on should you choose to.

The book’s illustrations look like watercolours - whole pages, sometimes double-spread, with blues and greens and black water and white ice and shadows and rocks. Then there’s the blaze of the stove in the cabin, inviting the reader right inside and into the adventure. The little boat with tiny children on board in a wild-waved and roiling sea is my favourite.

A good children’s book ignites curiosity in adults. To the Ice left me with research rabbit holes to go down and connections to make. On one level, this is an adventure story along the lines of Where the Wild Things Are.

Do Ida, Jack and Max really sail off on an ice floe and live for hours, days or years in a tiny cabin full of abandoned tins of fish balls? Or were they playing, or dreaming? They don’t know, and we don’t either. But the story leaves us clues, along with dreams. It’s lovely.