Why a Booktrail?
1889: a whaler’s daughter from Dundee sets out to become a scientist and explorer.
Under A Pole Star
What you need to know before your trail
Flora Mackie is fascinated by the landscape and the journey she’s made with her father across the Arctic Circle when she was only 12. How does a girl from Dundee become fascinated by the open seas and the Greenland landscape.
Following studies in London,she gets the chance to head an expedition back to Greenland but she has to deal with a male world and the attitude that she doesn’t belog
Meanhile, geologist Jakob de Beyn joins a rival expedition, led by the furiously driven Lester Armitage. When Jakob and Flora’s paths cross, it is a fateful meeting.
All three become obsessed with the north, a place where violent extremes exist side by side: perpetual night and endless day; frozen seas and coastal meadows; heroism and lies. Armitage’s ruthless desire to be the true leader of polar discovery takes him and his men on a mission whose tragic outcome will reverberate for years to come.
Locations
ResetTravel Guide
Immediately to set the scene there’s a glossary of Inunit words. The landscape of cold and ice is set from the very start.
A journalist as excited as the reader sitting next to the very woman who was called the Snow Queen and who may have been embroiled in the Armitage de Beyn controversy..an expedition which went missing and where she was the only one to survive in this hard landscape.
Scotland
Cassie leaves Scotland with her father on the ship and even the journey there is fraught with danger. People have told her a ship with sailors is no place fora young girl.
London
She moves here so she can study under well known scientists. It’s where her path will cross with that of Jakob
The Atlantic Ocean
The journey is one where the ship is steered via the stars and past the Great Bear etc – already close to the land where real wild animals and the wilderness at large will be.
“The whole watery, deliquescent world glittered”
The Pole Star
The pole star is also called Tyrban and was discovered by the Egyptians as they built their great pyramid so that they star would shine directly on it. Other stars we are old will be the pole star in the future since the earth constantly moves on its axis and so the pole star is ever changing.
This is a wild and remote landscape where whales are butchered for meat.
Greenland
Flora learns at collage that Greenland is a place so primitive that its hardly worth a visit. Several expeditions have tried and failed before such as the Greely one. Flora just wants to go even more despite the dangers.
This is land of remoteness, cold, isolation and a chilling sense of foreboding. Not knowing what will happen next and when the weather will change. Each chapter and part of the journey is peppered with coordinates – so you feel as if you’re going on the exact same journey as the trepid explorers.
Booktrailer Review
Susan: @thebooktrailer
I love books like this – where the landscape is so remote and cold and unfriendly that you even feel nervous about going there in fiction form. But there’s something about explorers and what they achieved despite the lack of technology we have now and the work they had to do to get to the most inhospitable places on earth that really fascinates me. The early scenes of a woman known as the Snow Queen heading back with a journalist who’s hoping to find out about this amazing woman and what happened on that journey were just full of foreboding and it was the start of a great read for me.
It’s the landscape of Greenland which for me is just fascinating and eerily evoked. The ice and water are weapons, wild and unpredictable, the boat journey through the ice fraught with danger never mind when they get there. Flora for me was a character made for role of explore – no nonsense and I did chuckle when she turned out to be someone who had tried humour in her twenties and then gave it up.
It’s a novel which reads like a ghostly expedition through one of the most hostile shipping lanes in the world a land so remote and cold that few have managed to go there and return successfully. But imagine the excitment of being the first if not one of the first. If you go missing people here then who would ever know?
Ooh I did like this one. Chilling in more ways than one but ethereal too.
Booktrail Boarding Pass Information: Under A Pole Star
Author/ Guide: Stef Penney Destination: Greenland, North West Passages Departure Time:1889
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