My Last Continent

April 25, 2016
Raymond’s (Learning English) first novel is both a complicated love story and an education in the plight of penguins in Antarctica, showcasing the beauty and terror unique to one of the world’s most remote terrains. The many facts about penguins are compelling, though the book veers dangerously close at times to being a jeremiad on the effects of humans on the birds’ now precarious lives. At the heart of the story is the complex relationship between Deb Gardner, a penguin researcher, and Keller Sullivan, a former Boston attorney whose tragic home life is the catalyst for his escape to Antarctica, moving up the ranks to become a nature guide. While the author skillfully captures the stunning and singular landscape and its special inhabitants, her depiction of the human relationships are less successful: from the frustrating on again, off again nature of Deb and Keller’s partnership (they are primarily only together in Antarctica during tourist season), to one tourist committing suicide because of his wife’s infidelity and another tourist couple’s stereotyped arguments about their readiness for parenthood. There’s also a later plot point that’s a dud. Still, Raymond’s novel has its high points, and will appeal most to environmentally minded armchair adventurists.

June 1, 2016
A delicate romance, a fragile habitat, and two people who literally have gone to the end of the earth to find each other form the heart of this intricately constructed tale set against the majestic backdrop of Antarctica's ice floes and pitted against the severity of its unforgiving environment. Each recovering from devastating losses, penguin experts Deb Gardner and Keller Sullivan find mutual comfort in the continent's eerie isolation, which is sacrificed when their research vessel is forced to play host to increasing hordes of ecotourists. It is one thing for a properly outfitted ship such as theirs to navigate the treacherous Southern Ocean; it is another when an ill-equipped luxury liner carrying hundreds of people ventures into the glacial waters. Tragedy strikes, and in the act of rescuing the liner's passengers, Deb and Keller put their own lives at risk. At once a high-stakes romance and a cautionary tale about the precariousness of this pristine polar world, Raymond's masterful debut contemplates the ecological and emotional dangers that lurk within and without uncharted waters.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)