Recent Radio Appearances
You can click on the audio players below to listen to live radio interviews with Diane regrarding Season of Ice.February 25, 2008 – Maine Public Broadcasting Network
February 26, 2008 – Coffee Chat, WKXL 1450 AM, Concord, NH
Winner of a prestigious PEN American fellowship. In late fall Genesis’ father ventures out on Moosehead Lake in northern Maine and never returns. When the lake freezes over, so do the lives and hopes of Genesis and her family. With no body, and no hope of finding one until the ice thaws, the family is denied access to insurance money, and a period of insufferable waiting begins. As the long winter drags on, rumors of a faked death and an extra-marital affair surface. Genesis takes on her own search for the truth about her father…and in the process, discovers the woman she is fast becoming.
Taut and darkly compelling, Season of Ice perfectly captures the intensity of a young woman bracing for truth, inadvertently finding love, and waiting for answers that only the thaw will bring.
Praise for Season of Ice
“Well-written and evocative…draws the reader into a starkly beautiful landscape the author knows well.” - The PEN American/Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Award Committee
“Les Becquets has a gift for placing readers amidst the people and terrain of the region. Sports enthusiasts will be intrigued by Gen’s ice-car racing, based on real life teenaged racer Nikki Hamilton.” – Kirkus Reviews
“…Genesis is a character of tremendous strength. It’s a tender story of a tough, smart, loving girl who finds she can rise to the challenge of what she’s lost because of what she’s gained. Readers will understand her and admire her, and find her difficult indeed to forget.” – BCCB starred review
“Diane Les Becquets’s 17-year-old heroine is made of sterner stuff than her New Age name suggests – and has bigger things to worry about. She lives in northern Maine with her half-brothers, her stepmother and her father, Mike, a tree ‘de-limber’ for a timber company, and gets her thrills unleashing her 1993 V6 Mustang, ‘five-speed, 3.8 liter engine,’ with the local ice-racing club. She’ll need that toughness come the snowy November day when her dad, ‘a meek giant’ of a man, fails to return home from Moosehead Lake. Because while Mike’s boat is found, his body isn’t, and ‘less than twelve hours later, the lake had begun to freeze, small pallets at first that eventually spread like a growth.’ There will be no more searching until spring. Thus begins the family’s season of ice, a frozen time without closure or insurance money, when rumors and resentments start to fester. Les Becquets distills this nightmare with eloquent restraint.” – The Washington Post
“…the action is thrilling, especially when Gen speeds through the ice and fog in a snowmobile and drives a truck up lonely dangerous hills, searching for closure and for a sense of her own true self.” – Booklist Review
“[Genesis's] slow climb back to the world of the living begins with the answers to many questions and with self-discovery. This well written, thought-provoking novel will ring true even for those who have not lost someone close. It is a soul searching quest that makes readers think about what is important and the steps needed to take charge of one’s life. A worthwhile purchase for most collections.” – Library School Journal
“The brutal realities of a Maine winter offer a vivid backdrop for this powerful, beautifully written novel of coming of age, and dealing with tragedy, that won the Pen American/Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Award. Les Becquets tells the story of 17-year-old Genesis and her struggle to come to terms with life-changing loss, after her father vanishes on a lake in Maine.” – Buffalo News
”Les Becquets, who is director of Creative Writing at Southern N.H. University, expertly crafts her tale; her narrative is as crisp and invigorating as a winter’s day. No wonder she’s touted as a ‘writer to watch’ by Publisher’s Weekly.” -New Hampshire Magazine
“I found the story and the detail wonderfully tied together with the setting. The exterior world of ice and snow matches the interior of Genesis’s struggle. She is frozen in uncertainty, waiting for the thaw – and the author does an excellent job of meshing the two. I feel that Season of Ice is a compelling read that was very well written.” – Thumbs Up
“Gen’s first-person account is harrowing….readers will keep hoping along with Gen that her family will make it through their trauma.” – Horn Book
“One thing I like about your writing is how you manage to be direct and sensuous at the same time. There’s an art to it.” – Baron Wormser, former Poet Laureate of Maine
“A compelling story, Season keeps you guessing about everything that happens, but at the same time offers a hint of foreshadowing. I liked it because there is so much action and emotion in it. I had a hard time finding any dry narrating or dialogue.” – Bangor News
“‘In the beginning, there was snow.’ Seventeen-year-old Genesis, a lifelong inhabitant of northern Maine, ins’t fazed by the flakes drifting from the sky that signal the first big storm of the winter, but she doesn’t then know what they herald. By nightfall her father, who had gone out on the lake to perform some dock repair, is missing, his empty boat found drifting in the frigid water the next day; within hours, the lake ices over with completeness that prevents a search for his body, leaving Genesis, her stepmother, and half-brothers to make it through the winter facing the near-certainty that the man at the center of their lives is dead – and also the tormenting possibility that he’s not.
That situation may sound like the setup for a mystery, but there’s really not much doubt about Mike’s fate; it’s just that the merest possibility of his deliberate departure, a possibility fed by an offhand rumor, leaves Genesis with a focal point for her anxiety and longing. Her pursuit of the slender thread of gossip (which suggests that he might have taken off with another woman) provides her with a way to remain involved with him still and to explore parts of his life, such as his long periods away at a logging camp, of which she previously knew nothing. Ultimately what she realizes is that she did, in fact, know the important aspects of her father’s life – that he was a good man who loved his family devotedly.
It’s a heartbreaking story from the very beginning, but Les Becquets turns it into something well beyond a mere tearjerker. The setting is as much the point as plot here, with the author moving from her previous southern spicy Cajun venue (in Love, Cajun Style, BCCB 1/06) to frigid northern with touches of Acadian in Genesis’ paternal grandmother. The iced-over northern Maine milieu is superbly realized: Genesis races cars on the frozen lake in winter, a popular regional pastime, but locals are also keenly aware, and periodically reminded by tragedy, of the ice’s intolerance for folly. The winter conditions are vivid in their concrete implications, as Genesis races across the ice under which her father’s body is almost certainly imprisoned, bu the setting is also emotionally apt, as Genesis’ bereavement hits a state of suspended animation: ‘I didn’t think of my dad as dead, even if he was below the ice cover. Instead, what I felt was that he was in some kind of hibernation, and eventually he would wake up and come home.’
In Genesis’ case, that hibernation is, etymologically speaking, literal, and the suspended state of her grief seems logical given the circumstance. Yet such is grief in general; the unusual situation merely gives Les Becquets a particularly telling way to explore the frozen world of sadness and the bafflement that descends upon the bereaved as they struggle to understand a world suddenly empty, a world that changed in an instant (Genesis keeps going over that last afternoon for signs, or to reprove herself for her own insufficiencies). Plainspoken Genesis, who has already lost a mother to abandonment, is articulate about the true extent of her devastation: ‘I had not just lost someone I loved. I had lost someone who loved me more than anyone might ever love me again.’
Yet Genesis is a character of tremendous strength, a girl of whom her father is understandably proud, and even if she doesn’t find the answers she thought she wanted, she finds enough in her father’s legacy to bring her peace, thawing out of her frozen grief into life just as the spring brings thaw, and answers, to the lake. It’s a tender story of a tough, smart, loving girl who finds that she can rise to the challenge of what she’s lost because of what she’s gained. Readers will understand her and admire her, and find her difficult indeed to forget.” – Deborah Stevenson, Editor, BCCB