I have been in love with Titus Oates for quite a while now—which is ridiculous, since he’s been dead for ninety years. But look at it this way. In ninety years I’ll be dead, too, and the age difference won’t matter.
Sym is not your average teenage girl. She is obsessed with the Antarctic and the brave, romantic figure of Captain Oates from Scott’s doomed expedition to the South Pole. In fact, Oates is the secret confidant to whom she spills all her hopes and fears.
But Sym’s uncle Victor is even more obsessed—and when he takes her on a dream trip into the bleak Antarctic wilderness, it turns into a nightmarish struggle for survival that will challenge everything she knows and loves.
In her first contemporary young adult novel, Carnegie Medalist and three-time Whitbread Award winner Geraldine McCaughrean delivers a spellbinding journey into the frozen heart of darkness.
Featured in Volume I, Issue 2 of WOW Review.
- ISBN: 9780060890353
- Author: McCaughrean, Geraldine
- Published: 2007, HarperTeen
- Themes: action and adventure, Polar regions, Survival stories
- Descriptors: Arctic, Realistic Fiction, Young Adult (ages 14-18)
- No. of pages: 384
Reading The White Darkness (McCaughrean, 2005) brings the topic of “getting home” into full relief! An absorbing tale of fourteen-year-old Sym, who, while captivated by Antarctica, did not expect to make the trip to “The Ice” so soon, nor did she expect to relive Scott’s struggle for survival once she got there. Astute readers will see the disaster coming, and every reader will be on the edge of their seat wondering and hoping Sym will come out alive—and get home to her mother–rather than become a casualty of the fierce climate of Antarctica. I love a good adventure tale, and this one is great! Readers will also find out so much about the Scott expedition and about the continent of Antarctica itself in this remarkable read.