SHACKLETON’S STOWAWAY

Wisely using only real people and sticking close to the actual events of Shackleton’s ill-fated expedition, McKernan does justice to one of the past century’s great true adventure stories. Those events are as dramatic as it comes, as readers of Jennifer Armstrong’s Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World (1998) or Elizabeth Cody Kimmel’s Ice Story (1999) will attest. Setting out in 1914 to cross Antarctica, Shackleton and 27 men were trapped by ice that eventually destroyed their ship and left them huddled together, barely sheltered from the elements, for 22 months. Teenaged wanderer Perce Blackborow provides the point of view; hoping to measure himself against both nature and his fellow men, he stows away—and finds himself facing harder tests to his courage, spirit, and physical endurance than he’d ever imagined. The author smoothly integrates invented but credible banter and tensions, adds full measures of excitement, terror, boredom, pain, and exhaustion, then closes with sketches of each major participant’s later life, plus several resource lists. A compelling alternative to the nonfiction accounts. (Fiction. 11-13)