Doesn't anybody do research anymore? (Rating 1 of 5)
» pyat
Fourteen years after Captain Lawrence (Titus) Oates walked to his death in the snow and went down in history as the quintessential gallant gentleman, a woman named Kit Gray knocked on the door of the manor house of Caroline Oates, mother of the famous polar explorer, and told her something like this: "Mrs. Oates, some years before your son went to the Antarctic, he impregnated an 11-year-old girl. I'm his daughter." The young mother must have endured her own subzero journey of exile, orphanages, and shame, thanks to this example of fearless gallantry. Michael Smith rather sheepishly mentions it in his biography of Oates. A little bit of research would cast some stark light on the appallingly naοve section of White Darkness on page 325, which was cited in another review as "absolutely beautiful", to wit: "It's true: Everyone needs a reason to stay alive--someone who justifies your existence. Someone who loves you. Not beyond all reason. Just loves you. Even just ..." Yep, that would pretty much announce open season for a pedophile. Who knows? Oates just may have gone on that doomed expedition in order to save his beloved mother from the scandal and escape his own dark secret. He may have intended to die, for walking out in the snow to unburden his fellows was just about the only "honorable" committing of suicide possible for him. That's meat enough for a serious adult treatise but nowhere one would want to go in young fiction. If you want to set up a role model for a girl reader and have the protagonist in your story coached by somebody, why not pick a hero like Sylvia Earle or Vera Rubin? An obsession with a Victorian old boy with a shady past seems kind of dead in the snow to me
Dramatic and unique (Rating 3 of 5)
» Musicrose05
I read this book last year and still remember many details about it. Sym, a 14-year-old girl, is obsessed and in love with titus oates,the only weird thing about it is; he is dead. Shes never even met him. She talks to him inside her head and believes he can actually communicate with her. She love antartica and knows almost everything about it. Her uncle takes her there and is in hunt of an underground world. She starts to realize that maybe things aren't right with some people around her and starts to see that she hhasn't been living in reality. This book is a must read, but also very weird. Read it and see for yourself
Waited awhile before writing (Rating 4 of 5)
» Living thru the Pages
My goal in reading this book was to become more familiar with "Young Adult" novels.
Being that this book was awarded the Printz Award - it jumped to the top of the pile.
There were several very unusual components to this book - a teen who loves anything that has to do with Antarctica - a teen who has a "special friend." This special friend just happens to be an famous explorer.
There is an absolutely beautiful section beginning on page 325, "It's true: Everyone needs a reason to stay alive- someone who justifies your existence. Someone who loves you. Not beyond all reason. Just loves you. Even just ..."
Also on page 365 there is a postscript "Scott of the Antarctic" that pulls together an explanation and historical account of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his search for the South Pole in 1911.
All things considered, this is an interesting selection for a teen (or adult) and the reader may find themselves thinking of certain aspects of this book long after the reading of it
Umm, no (Rating 1 of 5)
» G. K. RN
I hated this book.
At first, I liked it. I thought it was pretty good, pretty interesting. But as I kept reading, I began to think how WEIRD it really was. Sym is one STRANGE girl. WHAT is her obsession with Titus Oates? it certainly makes her a unique heroine, but for me, it made me think she was literally insane. She is not normal. I don't know why Sigurd ever fell for her. Too weird. I couldn't relate with her at all, since she was such an odd duck.
The whole Uncle Victor thing also didn't work for me. Again, WEIRD. He was weird! Now, this is more acceptable, but still...all the elements together did not mesh. They didn't form a good story for me. I wouldn't recommend this book
An insatiable lust for the Antarctic (Rating 4 of 5)
» Jessica Lux
Fourteen year-old Sym is a classic young adult protagonist - the partially deaf social outcast who loses herself in intellectual pursuits and gets the boy in the end. Sym is obsessed with the white darkness of Antarctica, which is the favorite subject of her stand-in father, the wannabe adventurer Uncle Victor. Uncle Victor and Sym share a private world of science and history which makes Sym's outward life more bearable, especially after the death of her father.
As the story opens, Uncle Victor surprises Sym with an elite tourist expedition to the South Pole. Victor reveals that he is on a quest for Symme's Hole, a secret, mythical entrance to an underground civilization at the center of the earth. The reader will quickly realize that Victor harms others in his singleminded pursuit of adventure, but our narrator is painfully blind to Uncle Victor's sociopathic behavior. She passively accompanies him without questioning why he stranded her mother at home, destroyed their cell phone, and drugged their friends on the expedition. As the novel unfolds further, Sym slowly realizes how manipulative and deceitful Uncle Victor has been her entire life, and she is faced with life-or-death survival in the company of a maniac.
THE WHITE DARKNESS is an adventure tale, a romance, and a coming-of-age story. The novel is lyrically beautiful on the subject of the South Pole, but the protagonist's extreme passivity and lack of awareness render parts of the narrative slow and frustrating to read. Still, I was hooked by the suspense, and I enjoyed the voyage through this queer, white world
(Rating 1 of 5)
(Rating 3 of 5)
(Rating 4 of 5)
