This tale, set in northern Scandinavia of an imagined past, sometimes slashes forward to a narrator from our time. The story's spirited women and deer live in an ancient North without their men. Sirianna has two daughters; Myla is tender and vulnerable. Kirsi, whose need to go beyond their encampment alters the family's future. Their narrator-descendant, touching a deer's antlers, yearns to know these women's sorrows and joys. Shifts are as unpredictable as northern lights, with mysteries explained in many ways or never explained at all. Here a deer speaks, loves, and has its own wisdom. With many layers, Ice Becomes Water is a tribute to the souls of ancestors, a meditation on loss, and a dance of alternate realities. Not for children. "Magnificent, filled with allegory and story and lyricism." Barbara Rose Brooker, author of The Viagra Diaries