By: Geraldine Mccaughrean Publisher: HarperTeen Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: HarperTeen Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 384 Publication Date: January 01, 2007 Reading Level: Young Adult Release Date: January 02, 2007
I have been in love with Titus Oates for quite a while now—which is ridiculous, since he's been dead for ninety years. But look at it this way. In ninety years I'll be dead, too, and the age difference won't matter.
Sym is not your average teenage girl. She is obsessed with the Antarctic and the brave, romantic figure of Captain Oates from Scott's doomed expedition to the South Pole. In fact, Oates is the secret confidant to whom she spills all her hopes and fears.
But Sym's uncle Victor is even more obsessed—and when he takes her on a dream trip into the bleak Antarctic wilderness, it turns into a nightmarish struggle for survival that will challenge everything she knows and loves.
In her first contemporary young adult novel, Carnegie Medalist and three-time Whitbread Award winner Geraldine McCaughrean delivers a spellbinding journey into the frozen heart of darkness.
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 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.
A ripping good adventure and survival story Fourteen-year-old Symone struggles to survive in the coldest desert on earth, Antarctica. Adding to her trials are her traveling companions: a fanatic "uncle" obsessed with finding an entrance to the hollow earth and two confidence men. With friends like these, it's no wonder that she relies on the companion of her imagination, Captain Lawrence Oates, who died on Scott's expedition to the South Pole in 1912, for sound guidance.
This is a ripping good adventure and survival story that thrills the reader with enough spooky chills to simulate the Antarctic cold. It well deserves The Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature that it received in 2008 from the Young Adult Library Services Association, a division of the American Library Association.
So far so good. I just recieved this and it is very nice so far, very interesting. I hope it stays that way.
2008 Printz Award Winner :-( I am forcing myself to read this book for my job. I'm nearly half way through and i can hardly make myself go any farther. The book has an intersting premise and the author has talent which is made clear buy her engaging style. The characters are just not likeable. The main character Sym comes off as a nut, and her uncle Victor is just creapy. I understand that the whole social outsider thing, i was one myself in school. But come on, a character who is so delusional and obsessed and cripplingly shy has the main character in this book needs professional help. I was quite supprised when this book won the ALA's Printz Award. There have been many more engaging and entertaining books written in Young Adult literature this year. In my opinion, the three other books that were nominated for this award were much better. Check out the Dreamhunters by Elizabeth Knox, One Whole and Perfect Day by Judith Clarke, or Repossessed by A.M. Jenkins.
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