This novel’s futuristic 2055 setting is a world where much of the northern hemisphere including Canada has been devastated by an environmental crisis and lies buried under ice and snow. As a teenager, Chandra’s very survival is dependent on the limited resources that the powerful Southern Alliance – an enormous group of American corporations who rule the world – allows border-bound Canadian communities to have. Schools and universities have been closed indefinitely, and Chandra feels trapped by her snow-bound existence. When her artist mother suddenly disappears without a trace, Chandra is certain she’s been kidnapped by the Southern Alliance and decides to cross the tightly controlled border to find her. But although she finds her mother, Chandra also discovers a terrible plot in which the Southern Alliance plans to systematically exterminate Canadians and take control of their natural resources. Chandra has to act quickly to save her country.

At its best, this powerful science fiction novel will grab the attention of young readers who liked Janet McNaughton’s The Secret Under My Skin. Harrison creates a sense of what life would be like in this futuristic dystopia, and she contrasts how this environmental crisis affects life, in subtly different ways, in small communities like Chandra’s, in a major city like Toronto, and in American cities far from the centre of the crisis. Unfortunately, readers are unlikely to believe in Chandra’s ability to single-handedly rescue her country, and far too much depends on happenstance: south of the border, Chandra just happens to meet a Canadian expat teen whose father just happens to run the stables for her mother’s kidnapper and can smuggle in Chandra’s notes and arrange meetings with her mother – with whom he falls in love, by the way. The Southern Alliance’s plot is also far-fetched, depending too much on Canadian paranoia that the U.S. is about to invade.