4 out of 5

‘Pole of Cold’ is essentially a story about pride – about its source, about the sacrifices we make for its sake – that blessedly comes from a unique perspective of a flip-flopped meet-cute.  Krause’s tale has the markings of the genre – our narrator very literally strips off her winter layers and states “I’m beautiful,” rolling her eyes at the boys’ breaths she takes away, then a plane deposits her would-be suitor whose bumbling nonetheless kindles something in her cold heart…  Aaaand you can see how the Mandy Moore version of this would write itself.  But Krause doesn’t take that path.  The lead’s frankness with her looks are a little sudden but warranted in the 60 below setting of Oymyakon, ‘The Pole of Cold,’ where the language, Sakha, can’t be picked up much beyond its borders and breath freezes as it leaves your mouth; in Oymyakon, there’s no need to be anything but frank.  And we’re walked through some basics of the land, the text mired with facts that are rattled off naturalistically, this blended with a story of a mother and a father and how they left their daughter to become the woman telling us this tale.  The conversational tone of the opening paragraph suggests a slice of life tale, and it is, but again, Krause manages to properly use a hook – the unique setting, in this case – to enhance the story, to act as part of the story and its characters – as opposed to just window dressing.  This gets pushed a little bit too far in the story’s final moment, an attempt to, I’d say, bring the reader into the experience that much more, but – at least for me – having the opposite effect of pushing me away.

One Story has presented another writer who’s proven immensely skilled at designing believable lives within a few scant pages.  Erika Krause takes a tired genre and a small pile of cliches and slickly makes them read anew, giving them all merit within her tale.