Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Eager for an adventure, Winter signs on to be writer-in-residence on a two-week journey through the Northwest Passage. Surrounded by fellow passengers on their own voyages of discovery, she watches the bird-watchers compare gear and life lists, the geologists hunt down rock samples, a songwriter share the pain of losing his father, and all manner of tourists take in stunning vistas and experience shock and awe over an approaching polar bear. Winter considers how the long arc of history has affected the north's native peoples and wonders about her own responsibility as a visitor when it comes to their current social and economic lives. She is also transfixed by the tragic story of British explorer John Franklin, who died with all his men while seeking a northwest passage that is now opening up due to climate change. Perceptive and thoughtful, Winter's ruminations on Arctic life and its continuous clashes with modern civilization are compelling and thought-provoking. The north is a place rarely visited and little understood, but it looms ever larger in our collective future, and to ignore it and its people would be an act of global arrogance.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Winter's profound and lyrical memoir of a transformative journey, which was shortlisted for the 2014 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, begins with a surprising coincidence. A week after taking a friend's advice to always to have a travel bag packed, Winter (Annabel) is offered a place on a ship going through the Northwest Passage. She travels from Toronto to Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, where the ship begins its journey north through the Davis Strait. At sea, Winter realizes that "there is no line or corner in a wave, no way for cares of the world to hook or snag you." The book is a series of evocative stories centered on Winter's memories, fellow passengers, experiences on the trip, and the subjugation of aboriginal culture by Europeans; through them all, Winter expresses a sense of wonder that she is in "a hiding place of mysteries." At many of the stops, the group walks, encountering the land and wildlife. On each successive walk, Winter increasingly comes to believe that the land can speak to her, and that she can listen and hear with a new sense beyond the usual five. Of all the kindred spirits Winter meets on this extraordinary journey, she writes most powerfully of the land. Agent: Shaun Bradley, Transatlantic Agency. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Literate, luminous travels in the far north. "Why read The Wind in the Willows when you can be Ratty or Mole?" It's not quite on the order of "because it is there," but it's a good enough rationale for adventure and a fine note on which to begin. British-Canadian novelist and essayist Winter (Annabel, 2010) confesses to having harbored desires to wander in the great white north since landing in Newfoundland with her father. He longed for something that we might call freedom, writes the author, whereas what she was looking for was even less tangible: "a glimmering, a beckoning; something in the ice, something promising in the Arctic light." Going to places that are well away from any tourist track and even the paths of most outdoor thrill-seekers, Winter finds that beckoning in such things as revelations about the differences between Greenlandic and Canadian Eskimos and the glimmering behind the eyes of people zapped by the endless light and space of the circumpolar vastness. Sometimes Winter's exercises in self-awareness verge on overly New Age-y ("I walked, ran, and wept in those trails in the woods, asking sky, alders, and water to talk to me, to bring me back that hint of something majestic and all-encompassing"). But more often, Winter finds just the right note of learned wonder, taking on big philosophical questions as she roams across the land: when a geologist makes a map, does he or she kill the place being mapped before the first drill is sunk? Is it possible to live apart from and independent of the land, even in a place like New York City? Is a life without contradiction worth living? With the eye of a poet and the stamina of an Amundsen, Winter proves a delightful guide into unexplored realms. Worthy of shelving alongside Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams (1986). Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
