Reviews

• This book grips from the outset. McCaughrean skilfully enables the reader to see more than the narrator, and tension quickly mounts as we wonder at Uncle Victor`s motives. The imaginary dialogue between the narrator and Titus Oates is by turns funny, sad and touching and cleverly weaves parts of the story of Scott`s doomed 1911 expedition into the narrative. Once we reach the Antarctic, the prose flowers into vivid poetic descriptive evocations which finely balance the grip of the story. The unhinged vision at the centre of the tale is hard to take seriously, but the quality of the writing renders this ultimately irrelevant. Read this book.

• Read it. Abandon vampires and the walking dead forever. Metaphors they are, but this is far, far better. Read this instead. Geraldine McCaughrean is a fabulous writer!

• Die Geschichte ist sehr interessant, wenn auch an manchen Stellen zu unwahrscheinlich. Die Charaktere hätten mehr vertieft werden können - stellenweise doch sehr klischeehaft, z. B. die Antarktis-Touristen. Dennoch ein empfehlenswertes Jugendbuch!

• I ordered a new and unused book and received an old used book. Not cool 😑

• Geraldine McCaughrean, whose Not the End of the World , a subversive way of looking at Noah's Flood, I had absolutely adored, here turns her pull-few-punches gaze on a story of the Antarctic, marrying revisitings of Scott's expedition with the story of a young girl, and a fascination/obsession with Titus Oates, from that expedition, and her own, much darker trip to the Antarctic. I am devoted to books with Polar, frozen settings, and I do very much like fine writing for teens which does not patronise, dumb down, or underestimate the intelligence of that audience. As McCaughrean is definitely a writer without an ounce of `talking down to' in her writing, and is moreover a writer who makes any reader - teen or far beyond the YA world, work and pay attention whilst at the same time being driven on by `what happens next and to whom' urgency, I really expected to love this book And I did and I didn't. The central character, Sym, is intelligent, wounded, rather a loner, and out of step within the world of her peers, who appear to be an unlikeable, superficial, tiresome bunch, Sym is extremely likeable, an attractive combination of maturity and integrity but despite some sort of emotional wisdom, she is extremely innocent of `street smarts', and therefore extremely vulnerable to those without the integrity she has. And that is pretty well every character in the book. She has a rich inner fantasy life. Her father died when she was quite young, and she has constructed a strong inner male hero, protector, guide, who teeters between father figure, someone SHE protects, and possible future lover. This fantasy figure is Titus Oates, always in her head and heart, with whom she has imagined conversations, whom she goes to for advice - he almost functions as an aspect of her best self. She is extremely complex, and absolutely out of step with a more simplistic, unsubtle world, especially a world filled with people on the make. I failed to completely love this book in part because the situations Sym was manipulated into were very distressing indeed to an adult reader. I suspect the intended audience may have slightly tougher skins, certainly those that are possessed of street smarts and affect a world-weary demeanour. I found myself slightly shocked that this is a book for children. But it can't be denied that the world contains plenty of people who DO prey on, and exploit children, in many different ways. McCaughrean tells her story sensitively and some of my sense of disturbance, paradoxically comes because she is so light touch. She trusts the reader's sensibility. . It is a book, apart from Sym herself and her imaginary presence of Titus Oates, pretty much without another major redeeming or redeemable character, whether adult or child/teen. Sym herself is the only light, brightness. The frozen, indifferent, beautiful, treacherous landscape is a major character in this. The only concession to the age of her audience, I felt, was the ending. Not quite one which works for this reader, I felt the author had pulled a little back from reality, allowed a couple of coincidences too far, to provide something a little more palatable, a little less bleak

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