First published 4th December, 2005 in StarMag
THE WHITE DARKNESS
By Geraldine McCaughrean
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 272 pages
I HAVE been in love with Titus Oates for quite a while now – which is ridiculous, since he’s been dead for 90 years.”
The reader gets a pretty clear idea what Symone, heroine of The White Darkness, is like from the first line of Geraldine McCaughrean’s latest (and, in my opinion, best thus far) novel.
Captain Lawrence “Titus” Oates, one of the men on Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated 1911 expedition to the South Pole, is not usually the sort of bloke 14-year-olds obsess about. but Symone, shy, sensitive and romantic, has neither the vocabulary nor the stomach for the preoccupations of the average 21st century adolescent. While her classmates discuss snogging and boys, she dreams about glaciers and snow storms and Oates.