Under a Pole Star

Written by Stef Penney

Narrated by Cathleen McCarron and Thomas Judd

Flora Mackie first crossed the Arctic Circle at the age of twelve. In 1889, the whaler's daughter from Dundee - dubbed by the press "The Snow Queen" - sets out to become a scientist and explorer. She struggles to be taken seriously but determination and chance lead her back to northern Greenland at the head of a British expedition, despite the many who believe that a young woman has no place in this harsh world of men. Geologist Jakob de Beyn was raised in Manhattan. Yearning for wider horizons, he joins a rival expedition, led by the furiously driven Lester Armitage. When Jakob and Flora's paths cross, it is a fateful meeting. All three become obsessed with the north, a place where violent extremes exist side by side: perpetual night and endless day; frozen seas and coastal meadows; heroism and lies. Armitage's ruthless desire to be the true leader of polar discovery takes him and his men on a mission whose tragic outcome will reverberate for years to come. Set against the stark, timeless beauty of northern Greenland, and fin-de-siecle New York and London, Under a Pole Star is a compelling look at the dark side of the 'golden age' of exploration, a study of the corrosive power of ambition, and an epic, incendiary love story. It shows that sometimes you have to travel to the furthest edge of the world in order to find your true place in it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781501959714

Stef Penney

Stef Penney was born and raised in Edinburgh. She is the author of The Tenderness of Wolves, which was a national bestseller and the recipient of the prestigious Costa Book Award. She is also the author of The Invisible Ones and Under a Pole Star. Stef lives in London.

Reviews for Under a Pole Star

[adrianburke_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent.

[neal_-266394 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Too much romance, not enough adventure!

[sianpr · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A powerfully charged love story drives the plot in this story of Artic exploration at the turn of the 20th Century. Flora Mackie, the daughter of a Scottish whaler, proves to be an agentive and feisty heroine as she sets out to determine the course of her own life rather than follow convention. Told alternatively through her eyes and those of Jakob de Beyn, the American geologist who becomes her lover, Stef Penney weaves a gripping tale of rivalries in the early days of Artic exploration, the exploitation of the Inuit and the all-consuming passion that overcome Flora and Jakob. The narration of place is fantastic and the story is gripping.

[fionarobyningram · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I hate to give an author a three, but this book is a case of seriously timid editing by the editor and seriously arrogant over-writing by the author. If you like ice and historical polar exploration, this is the book for you. The historical premise of the book is its own strength and had the author trusted this, the book would not have ended up being such a huge, lumbering, and unwieldy mix of genres in a story that went nowhere. The story starts in the present time and it is very annoyingly written in the present tense, a popular device among authors who seem oblivious to the fact that the reader struggles to maintain focus. Adding to the reading difficulty is that the book then jumps back into the past, and into past tense. The historical facts about the drive to discover the polar regions is fascinating and as cut-throat as any drive by modern explorers. The details of the journeys, while flogged to the nth degree with descriptions, are equally fascinating and it’s a wonder people made it to their destinations. But the pages and pages of descriptions are tiresome and do not make for an eager reader. I got the feeling the author feared her readers were incapable of using their imaginations. The main character, Flora, is as cold as the ice she loves. Flora is completely unlovable and unloving, despite the (again) pages and pages of detailed sex scenes which became boring and sometimes tiresome, not to mention what I felt is a gratuitous use of vulgar language. I’m no prude but suddenly mixing up historical exploration with a woman’s drive to liberate herself in every possible way and steeped in outrageously purple prose worthy of bodice rippers – this not literary fiction for me. The sex scenes were ‘dumped’ into a story where they had no real place, not even to describe the deep and almost obsessive-compulsive passion Flora has for Jacob (actually the nicest character). The Flora we meet at the beginning and end of the tale seems to be a completely different character to the Flora of the actual story. It was like reading about two different people. There were many other themes which deserved expansion such as the terrible impact these explorers/invaders had on the local indigenous population; the fact that two murders took place and were never fully resolved; the fact that Flora had a ‘meh’ attitude by the end of this tome to everything that had happened; her later husband/s were never discussed and it was as if the story ran out of its own steam. I finished this book out of curiosity, but I won’t read other books by this author. Verbose and pretentious.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a novel about polar exploration in the Victorian era. Written by Stef Penney, an author I like a lot, I had high hopes for this novel and it almost met them. When her mother dies when Flora is only twelve, her father, the captain of a whaling vessel, takes her on board. They spend years sailing to the western edge of Greenland, where Flora becomes accustomed to being on board a ship and to the Arctic. She makes friends with Inuit children and loves her life of freedom. When she grows older, her father abruptly returns her to Britain, leaving her alone with the desire to back to the north and no way to get there. Jakob is the son of an engineer working on the Brooklyn bridge until his accidental death sends Jakob and his older brother to live with unwilling relatives. Raised in tight spaces in a crowded immigrant neighborhood, Jakob dreams of wide open spaces, eventually becoming a geologist and working in the west, but always with the dream of joining an Arctic expedition. For the most part, this is a solid novel about early Arctic exploration, with a focus on how the whalers and explorers interacted with the local population. It did falter though, in the central story of the relationship between Flora and Jakob. It threw the balance of the novel out of kilter, with way too much of the ins and outs of their complicated love affair and too little of what made the book so interesting - Flora's unique experience of being a woman in what was then seen as solely a man's world and how she dealt with that. And sex scenes, like any other events in a novel, should serve to move the story along. While a few did illuminate the relationship between Flora and Jakob, many of them seems to just exist to pad out an already substantial book. Still, it's hard to beat a well-researched novel about explorers in wild places.