South Pole Station

May 1, 2017
Shelby’s debut novel is a (literally) chilling story of Antarctic survival at South Pole Station, where scientists, artists, and support personnel live, work, argue, and pout inside a geodesic dome in temps of 35 degrees below zero. Cooper Gosling, an unsuccessful artist, “your typical aimless thirty-year-old looking to delay the inevitable slide into mediocrity,” is accepted for a one-year assignment to South Pole Station as part of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. She truly is adrift in her career and personal life, but finds comfort and inclusion at South Pole Station, where personality disorders and a fondness for alcohol are seemingly requirements. The station’s isolation, close-quarters living, and bitter cold do not inspire her; more interesting for Cooper are the people and relationships she observes—the social tribes and ego posturing, especially when a hated scientist arrives. Dr. Frank Pavano is a climate change denier, and his presence riles the other scientists. When Cooper helps Pavano with an unauthorized experiment and is maimed in an accident, a blame-game investigation, a global warming scandal, and congressional outrage and meddling with funding threaten the station’s future. Cooper and her polar pals stage a mutiny, resulting in a tense, ice-cold showdown with the feds, the media, a greedy defense contractor, and an insidious energy company. This is a fascinating novel, loaded with interesting history of Antarctic exploration, current scientific operations, and the living and working conditions of those folks brave enough to endure six months of darkness and six months of daylight.

June 15, 2017
In the messy human petri dish at the South Pole, a comic novel brews.Shelby begins her smart and inventive first novel with 11 italicized questions plucked from a psychiatric evaluation: "Are you often sad? Do you have digestion problems due to stress? Do you have problems with authority?..."Any American headed to Antarctica in 2003 via the National Science Foundation must answer them. It's a nifty way to unpack character and signal why her heroine, Cooper Gosling, has passed only provisionally. Cooper is 30, a drinker and a fine arts painter from the upper Midwest, a smartass who holds that "hotdish had never received its gastronomic due and the fake Minnesota accents in Fargo were the blackface of regional phonology." Fetching and witty, Cooper becomes the station chief's favorite and irresistible to a tall and handsome astrophysicist. Their attraction--one of the novel's key pleasures--is telegraphed within the first few pages. Readers also learn early that Cooper is fleeing the sorrow of her twin's recent suicide; she carries a pinch of his ashes in a travel-size Tylenol bottle. Thus, Shelby balances Eros with Thanatos in a story composed of barbed dialogue, email, and official memos. A climate-change skeptic arrives to bedevil the polar community, hatching a far-fetched political conspiracy. Clearly, the writer likes agita--politics mixed with science fuels Red River Rising (2004), her nonfiction book about the catastrophic 1997 flood in Grand Forks, North Dakota. She writes well about science and the peculiar, pressurized human ecosystem at the bottom of the world. Bozer, a polar station construction chief, gets his own point-of-view chapter, and it lifts him from caricature to one of the best aspects of the book. Hovering over all is Cooper's sort-of "spirit animal," the British explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who wrote the Antarctica classic The Worst Journey in the World. This new book would no doubt confound him but, in the end, bring him delight. Jokes lubricate a moving and occasionally preposterous story of love and death in the Antarctic cold.

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Starred review from April 15, 2017

Struggling with a family tragedy and its aftermath, painter Cooper Gosling receives a science and writing grant to work at the South Pole Station. By going to the "ends of the earth," she hopes to accept her loss and adjust her thinking. The sharp learning curve includes harsh weather conditions, the hierarchy of the station's social structure, and the political implications of competing scientific theories. Cooper struggles to find a new way to express herself as she gradually becomes an accepted member of the inner circle. Then she's injured in a freak accident, an event that snowballs into a major international incident. In the aftermath, she builds a new perspective and approach to life and art. Shelby's first novel, based on a short story that won the Third Coast Fiction Prize, skillfully weaves science, climate change, politics, sociology, and art. Competing ideas about the origins of the universe are wrapped in the vagaries of human nature and the dangers of climate extremes. Her characters are a quirky subset of humanity. VERDICT All readers of fiction, particularly those interested in life in extreme climates, will find this appealing. [See Prepub Alert, 2/17/17.]--Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence

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June 1, 2017
Cooper Gosling has passed the rigorous physical and psychological tests required to spend a year in Antarctica in the National Science Foundation's Artists and Writers program. A talented painter who, at 30, has not yet realized her potential, Cooper is recovering from a family tragedy and looking for escape. She finds herself integrating with a community that includes scientists, artists, builders, and support staff with wildly different personalities, each seeking or fleeing something. Drawn to Sal, a physicist intent on disproving the Big Bang theory and assisting a climate change denier with his research, Cooper finds herself at the center of an incident with long-range implications for the station and its inhabitants. Journalist Shelby's first novel eschews easy choices and treats interpersonal relations, grief, science, art, and political controversy with the same deft, humorous hand. Readers will find characters to love, suspect, and identify with among Cooper's fellow Polies and won't forget them easily. A good match for readers whose interest in Antarctica was sparked by Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette? (2014), those who enjoy stories about quirky individuals and made families, and extreme armchair travelers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)