Under a Pole Star

Starred review from June 1, 2017

It's 1948, and for the first time, explorers will stand on the North Pole. Among those on the flight is an elderly British woman once called the Snow Queen. Flora first crossed the Arctic Circle at age 12, when her newly widowed father took her with him on his annual whaling voyage. The rough conditions and the freezing cold might have deterred a weaker woman, but Flora was enthralled; growing up, she heads to university, determined to return to northern Greenland as an explorer. When her first romance fails and her lover, American geologist Jakob de Beyn, leaves the Arctic for a more conventional life, Flora marries a fellow explorer who is crippled in a terrible accident. Unwilling to stay at home and be his nursemaid, the unconventional Flora becomes one of the first truly modern women, leading her own team north, writing about her discoveries, and not marrying. Penney does a masterly job of melding Flora's story with the more factual accounts of polar expeditions, and many of her characters are taken from the pages of history. VERDICT Penney's third novel (after The Tenderness of Wolves; The Invisible Ones) is a gripping tale about the men and women who were driven to conquer the Arctic. Bound to appeal to admirers of Eowyn Ivey's To the Bright Edge of the World.--Jane Henriksen Baird, Anchorage P.L., AK

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2017
A woman attempts to throw off Victorian convention as an explorer--and a lover.Flora Mackie's upbringing is unconventional, to say the least; after her mother dies when she's 12, her father, a whaling captain, brings his daughter on his travels toward the North Pole, where she learns the way of ships and navigation by stars. It's no wonder that when she chooses to study meteorology at university she does so with an eye to returning north to pursue her own goals at the earliest opportunity. Temporarily distracted by a tempestuous romance with a fellow student, however, it soon seems that Flora's desire to be a scientist and explorer will always war with affairs of the heart and the body. Indeed, for most of the novel, Flora's travels and studies seem to rank secondary to the desires of her body, and as she is schooled in the art of sex and the complications of love by her husband and lovers, there are a lot of graphic sex scenes. And herein lies the problem with Penney's (The Invisible Ones, 2012, etc.) novel: while there's no reason that Flora, as a multidimensional woman, shouldn't have a flourishing and liberated personal life, this side of the plot quickly overshadows the unique and beautiful side that describes her experiences in the exotic north. Then again, there are some lovely moments of prose, such as, "To winter's home; the whiteness that is always there, falling with infinite slowness, infinite patience, into the sea." The descriptions of the ice, of the endless nights and days that characterize the north, are beautiful; if only they hadn't been just backdrops to assignation after assignation. For a novel about "blackmail, lies, murder," it's rather light on the intrigue and heavy on the petting.

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September 18, 2017
This rich, thoroughly satisfying historical tale from Penney (The Invisible Ones) binds together adventure, passion, and love. The story opens with a frame sequence in 1948, as the elderly Flora Cochrane and young Randall Crane are set to fly to the North Pole as part of an American expedition. Randall is fascinated by Flora, so she recounts for him the Arctic explorations that she led a half-century before, a tale that makes up the bulk of the novel. It is on that earlier expedition that she met American geologist Jakob De Beyn, and a spark was struck between them. Though the two parted ways after the expedition, they carried a flame for each other despite living on opposite sides of the Atlantic and Flora’s marriage to another man. Penney’s prose is rapturous, whether she is describing the “overwhelmingly rich—glorious and unnecessary” landscape, or in her detailed and richly imagined passages on the attraction and intimacy between Flora and Jakob. By telling their story through recollection and the letters that they send, Penney imparts an additional layer of suspense, with neither the reader nor the characters knowing what may come, resulting in an exciting and transportive novel.

Starred review from August 1, 2017
Exhilarating in its scope and imagery, Penney's third novel, after The Invisible Ones (2012), conjures the adventurous spirit of the late nineteenth century, when the remote frozen North compelled the daring and ambitious. Flora Mackie, a Dundee whaling-captain's daughter, spends much of her adolescence above the Arctic Circle, via her father's ship, and feels most comfortable there. Her tale unfolds alongside that of Jakob de Beyn, who comes of age in fin de siecle New York. When they first meet, in northwestern Greenland in 1892, she's a serious-minded meteorologist leading a British expedition, while he has joined a rival American party as a geologist. Their unspoken attraction later blooms into a complicated love affair, relayed with candid intimacy. Competition for new discoveries leads to heightened tensions, and a mystery emerges after a tragedy occurs and suspicions of deceit arise. Serious issues like gender bias and exploitation are adeptly handled, and the icy Arctic setting comes alive in passages of shimmering beauty. Penney conveys both the elation and fear evoked when crossing into unfamiliar territory, be it geographical or emotional. She also delves into the customs and beliefs of the Inuit, whose generous hospitality to the Westerners is indispensable. An exceptional epic about an unconventional woman's life and loves.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)