Slow start, no grip, wondering when I'll relate to any of the characters---or if I want to relate to any of the characters at all. Perhaps save for a lethargic vacation that involves a high ratio of naps in the sunny sand to reading time.

This is a hugely impressive debut novel, full of bold language and striking imagery. The book is partly a tale of polar exploration, but the doomed adventurer's family story is equally important, as is the modern love story that frames it ( )

This was a perfectly charming little word-painting, a meditative non-act of wordplay that plays out in the silence between reader and page.

The author uses words precisely, shaping each deliberately with expert care in relation to the page and its fellows. Rolling her short, suspended sentences about the tongue, one senses even the mouth-feel of words has been considered in their artful selection and placement. Like a prose poem, this is a text meant to be read aloud, even if only in the echoes of your mind.

Her enjoyment with words is infectious: coruscating to "core us skating"; bare bear skin, padding on pads. Even punctuation plays a part, softly concluding each note so that its heft might weightlessly linger a moment in your mind. Whitespace is evident throughout, from the frozen simplicity of the binding to the ladderly gaps betwixt lines, bleak moats which must be crossed to reach the next flotilla of fine black text.

Not one to leave her reader stranded at the gates of meaning, the author comes with us on this quest, peeling back each page in an unusually present first-person plural point of view; and if omniscient, the narrative accompaniment reflects a mischievous and occasionally absent-minded aspect, easily distracted by will-o-wisp glints of memory.

I'm unsure whether I'm willing to term this delightful text a "novel", which is almost overly replete with cheesy connotations of dimestore pulp; this is more of an interactive still life, rolled out in slo-mo so the reader can savor each succulently crystalline freeze-frame.

I regret that I haven't had a chance to finish it, in part because the gently swaying lap and lull of the languid descriptions evoke such a dreamy state that it becomes an effort to pull ones eyes forward in time. I do want to spend more time with this experiential tour-de-placid, but I suppose I shall have to relinquish my copy and give some other explorer their chance to brave the candent ice :-/ ( )

It looks like I have had a bad hand in chosing ring-books to read before the summer holiday.
From the blurp it looked like a very promising or interesting book, but I was mistaken.

In my fist update I already said I found it boring. Well, that did not get better when I made progress in the book.

And when it didn't get any better untill page 100 (very descritpive story telling, not so much about the history of the ancestors as well as futilities about the present day life of Julia and her husband), I decided to put it aside and not read any further.

It'll go on its journey again soon.

I liked the descriptive and slightly over-elaborate writing style but not the pace of the book. It lacked a plot and fell flat at the end.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but this book disappointed me! ( )