Ice Out​

Coming May, 2022

​

She Writes Press

Francesca Boudin has a near-perfect life as an accomplished music teacher and professional flautist living in the country with her husband, Ben, and their four-year-old daughter, Addie. This ends suddenly when a snowmobiling accident traps the three of them in a frozen lake. Ben gets out, leaving her and Addie to die.

​

Francesca believes she sees their dog pull Addie from the lake and drag her into the nearby woods. Desperate to help her daughter, she struggles to emerge from the icy waters and follows them. Once she enters the forest, however, she finds herself trapped in a sinister dream-like world where night never ends, where Addie’s whereabouts remain hidden from her and where she encounters the Vilas, a group of women led by the White Widow. They, like Francesca, have been left to die and now seek to unleash their revenge on those who have harmed them. When the Vilas have Ben in their sights, Francesca realizes that if she is ever to escape this nightmare and save her daughter, she must first save the husband who abandoned them. 

​

While Francesca’s pilgrimage through this bleak landscape is on the surface a desperate attempt to find her daughter and to reestablish her life as it was before the accident, it becomes an allegorical journey that takes her from despair to hope, from grief to acceptance, from bitterness to forgiveness.