For months I have been waiting for a book just like this. I'm so glad I picked up The Dark Beneath the Ice.
The book follows teenager, Marianne. She quit dance recently and her parents are getting divorced. Her mom has some mental illness and Marianne must live with her aunt. Then things start happening. by themselves and Marianne loses time in chunks. Simple explanation of mental illness or demonic possession?
I thought I knew where this was going. Berube follows the horror tropes I love so much for most of the book. The end takes a turn I didn't expect, but it's a turn that is perfect for the book.
I was looking for a thriller. The kind of thriller with a mystery and compelling characters. I wanted the story to swallow me in it's pages. This book swallowed me in it's pages and I didn't want to put it down. I wasn't scared reading this book, but I was definitely creeped out. The scenes are spaced out perfectly and the characters respond in ways to promote suspense.
Marianne's story is told in first person and it is very character driven. Young Adult books with first person narratives always make me nervous. With this book I could barely tell the narrator was a teenager. The only thing that tipped me off was the discussion about school, but age is barely an important thing in this story. Marianne is a compelling, complicated character with great qualities and flaws that I understood.
A lot of buzz calls it Paranormal Activity meets Black Swan. I would not compare it to those at all. The Dark Beneath the Ice is refreshing and original story. I enjoy the thrillers that have more to say than the grotesque and jump scares. This book was the book I needed. I hope Berube writes more because this was fantastic.

This was creepy. It was eerie. And it home a lot harder that I thought it could.

Things are starting to happen around Marianne. Strange things. Scary things. Things that shouldn’t be possible. She swears it’s not her, but with her blackouts, how can she be sure?

The pacing of this book was fantastic. At any point where I felt like Marianne might be able to slow down and catch a break, something else happens to terrorize her. It kept me on my toes and kept me reading.

I loved the constant guessing, and I can honestly say that I liked the eventual reveal. The paranormal occurrences were creepy and I connected with the psychological aspects that Marianne was struggling with.
But while I thought both aspects were great individually and I think they could have really worked together, they didn’t end up meshing as well as they could have and that made the reasoning behind everything fall a bit short.

Overall though, I don’t think I’ve yet read a YA quite like this, and for that I have to recommend it.

THE DARK BENEATH THE ICE will grab reader’s attention and draw them in until the climactic ending. Twists and turns galore throughout the book will have readers guessing (and second guessing) where the book is headed and eagerly turning pages. Definitely recommend!

Overall I liked this. I didn’t find it creepy but I’m very difficult to scare so discount that as me being an outlier. I could see how others would find it creepy and it was certainly atmospheric. The prose was lovely if occasionally overblown and I loved the two MCs. Where it fell down a bit for me was the supernatural aspect. It just didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the book. This was nevertheless very enjoyable and I recommend it to all YA thriller fans.

This is an interesting approach for a YA horror, I don't think I've ever really read another book like this plotwise. It is a little slow paced and the characters weren't ones I connected with but it's thrilling enough and an easy read. Perfect for fans of Danielle Vega.

Y’know, I’m just going to keep this short.

This is YA horror at its finest.

Scary? Yes.

Suspenseful? Yes.

Girl loving girl content? Absolutely.

I’m still pondering about the reveal of what that sinister thing was, but overall, I breezed through this book. It was really good. Looking forward for more books by this author.

I wanted a lot more from this book than I got. The writing was good but I couldn’t get into the story or any of the characters.

This one was a bit disappointing.

Marketed as a Black Swan meets Paranormal Activity set the tone for an exciting paranormal meets psychological thriller and I couldn’t have been more excited to read this book and the cover itself is gorgeous but once I got into it I found myself questioning the point of the entire story. Our lead character Marianne just had her life turned upside down and immediately after getting dropped off at her aunt’s house strange things start to happen making her question whether or not she’s possessed and with no one except the goth girl Ron to talk to she sets off to try and figure out the cause of her haunting and end it once and for all.

For me the entire paranormal aspect didn’t work to the point that I started to think that was on purpose in order to add weight to the psychological aspect of the book but then the more I read the more I sat there wondering what the heck was going on and each new incident did nothing to further the story other than suggest the decline in Marianne’s own psyche and the side characters didn’t believe anything strange was happening but by the end we where supposed to believe not only did they sit and listen but accepted it all when a chapter ago they had someone committed for the same claims.

I get where they were trying to allude to plot elements in the Black Swan but where one managed to show the decline with a personification of another character as a result of years of self loathing and a strive for perfection, this book tries to do it in a way that offers you no real insight as to why so the big moment flops. Everything with the family dynamic was problematic yes, but not to the point that what happened to create the events that are plaguing Marianne now made sense or a foreshadowing of when this big moment that would come back to haunt her actually happened.

I don’t know this book might work for some people but for me it was a huge miss, I think it’s just a matter of trying to do too much at once or trying to pull off something deep and not quite achieving it.

**thanks to the publishers and netgalley for providing an arc in exchange for a fair and honest review**