A well-balanced humdinger of a story keeps this unusual novel hurtling along like a skidoo on the ice.
Three women come to Antarctica looking for answers and find each other.
Rosie Moore is an Antarctic veteran. But as she heads toward the continent for her third season working in the McMurdo Station kitchen, she finds herself questioning her nomadic nature and longing for a home. Composer Mikala Wilbo is a newcomer, hoping to bury her grief over the death of her longtime partner as she finally confronts her absentee father, a former hippie who has become one of the Pole’s most renowned scientists. It’s Rosie’s expertise that helps Mikala survive when their plane crashes on the ice, and Rosie’s sheer animal exuberance that first starts to reawaken the composer, who hasn’t written any music in months. But when Rosie discovers the dead body of a young woman who seems to have wandered off from the crash, the two are once again confronted by the fragility of life. “[T]he line between terror and peace, as well as the one between life and death, was mathematically thin, existed only in theory,” Rosie realizes. When Alice Neilson arrives to take the dead girl’s place, she acts as a catalyst. A determined homebody, in thrall to her controlling alcoholic mother, Alice is transformed by the Pole’s atmosphere of freedom. All three women find themselves falling in love, and all three must avoid the pitfalls of their pasts, until, finally, Alice’s emerging bravery sets in play a stunning rescue that will pull all three into a new phase of life. In this compelling novel, Bledsoe (How to Survive in Antarctica, 2006, etc.) captures the deadly beauty of the southernmost continent. Although the male characters tend to be a bit generic—gruff, sexy nerds—the three protagonists are distinctive.
A well-balanced humdinger of a story keeps this unusual novel hurtling along like a skidoo on the ice.Pub Date: May 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-299-23500-0
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.
A new life and book arise from the ashes of a devastating California wildfire.
These days, it seems the fires will never end. They wreaked destruction over central California in the latter months of 2018, dominating headlines for weeks, barely a year after Fies (Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, 2009) lost nearly everything to the fires that raged through Northern California. The result is a vividly journalistic graphic narrative of resilience in the face of tragedy, an account of recent history that seems timely as ever. “A two-story house full of our lives was a two-foot heap of dead smoking ash,” writes the author about his first return to survey the damage. The matter-of-fact tone of the reportage makes some of the flights of creative imagination seem more extraordinary—particularly a nihilistic, two-page centerpiece of a psychological solar system in which “the fire is our black hole,” and “some veer too near and are drawn into despair, depression, divorce, even suicide,” while “others are gravitationally flung entirely out of our solar system to other cities or states, and never seen again.” Yet the stories that dominate the narrative are those of the survivors, who were part of the community and would be part of whatever community would be built to take its place across the charred landscape. Interspersed with the author’s own account are those from others, many retirees, some suffering from physical or mental afflictions. Each is rendered in a couple pages of text except one from a fellow cartoonist, who draws his own. The project began with an online comic when Fies did the only thing he could as his life was reduced to ash and rubble. More than 3 million readers saw it; this expanded version will hopefully extend its reach.
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3585-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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