by Geraldine McCaughrean. Harper Tempest. 2007. 369p.
Sym is fourteen, and has many of the same issues that other teenage girls grapple with: belonging, boys and being teased at school. That said, she is also radically different than other girls, and maybe everyone else on the planet. She has an obsession with the Arctic, especially one explorer, Titus who has been dead ninety years, but who she has developed a friendhsip with in her mind. Sym’s father has recently passed away and her mother struggles to pay bills and keep them afloat. They have help from Sym’s “uncle” who isn’t actually related, but a former business partner of ther father’s. He has moved in to help take care of the family and make sure Sym is getting the type of education he deems appropriate.
Victor’s idiosyncrasies only compound as the story progresses. The reader learns that he believes cell phone signals can give you brain cancer, he sleeps upright in a strange contraption of a chair, and is fascinated by home remedies and home schooling. Most importantly to Sym, he is also obsessed with the Arctic. He decides to take both she and her mother to Paris one weekend for a little fun. What begins as a weekend getaway unravels into a globe-spanning, death defying journey.
Sym finds out after they’ve arrived in Paris without her mother who couldn’t seem to locate her passport at the last minute that Victor has actually been hiding that very passport in his coat. He then announces that they’ve got bigger plans than just Paris and they hop a plane to South America. Sym is concerned about notifying her mother but Victor assures her he’s got it taken care of. Once they land, they go about preparing for their real destination: Antarctica! Sym is excited to finally be visiting the place she has been fascinated with for so long and the place that her beloved companion, Titus lost his life. She spends most of her time in her own mind discussing things with him and as her journey becomes stranger she retreats even further into her imagination. This is made easier by the fact that she has a condition that requires her to wear hearing aids and sometimes causes the rest of the world to fade to white noise.
Victor and Sym join a tour group made up of other adventurers and they join up with a father and son team from Norway named Mansfred and Sigurd. Sym is transfixed by the intense experience of twenty four hour sunshine and the frozen tundra. When the rest of their tour group becomes mysteriously ill with some sort of stomach bug, people start to talk about catching the next supply plane home. When the plane that they hope will rescue them from their illnesses and the brutal cold explodes leaving them stranded, Sym wonders why they all soon crawl into their tents and fall into an exhausted sleep. Victor takes this opportunity with Mansfred to steal a gigantic Hagglund for making off across the tundra.
Sym soon finds out that Victor and Mansfred know each other and are planning together to find a hole in the ice crust called Symme’s Hole that Victor believes is the portal to another world inside the earth’s crust. Only after they’ve gone a fair distance toward this outrageous goal does Sym begin to suspect that her uncle is not quite the genius she’s always imagined him. Their harrowing journey is characterized by dangerous temperatures and cracks in the ice that cause them to nearly plummet to their death. This event causes Manfred to break character and admit that he’s conned Victor by posing as a film director who believes in Victor’s “discovery.” Victor leaves him to die. He also eventually admits to drugging the rest of the camp so that they could make their getaway, killing her father for not believing in his dream of finding Symme’s Hole, and finally giving Sym antibiotics as a child that ruined her hearing.
Sym and Sigurd, who it turns out is a paid actor try to devise a plan with the silent assistance of Sym’s imaginary expert explorer, Titus. Eventually Sigurd takes off with the Hagglund and leaves Sym and Victor to traipse toward their goal. Titus finds a tall chimney like structure of ice, which he clambers up to look in, believing he has found his portal. He maniacally jumps in, peeling off layers of clothes to fit and ultimately plummets into the darkness. Sym is alone and petrified in this world of white, turning totally inward toward Titus’ voice. He explains that his body isn’t here with her, having been taken by the ice and pushed out to sea long ago. She is surprised because, as a figment of her imagination, how could he have told her something she truly didn’t know? He helps her carry the pain that makes her feel like she can’t go on and eventually she is reunited with Sigurd and the Hagglund. She hatches a plan to set it on fire both for the warmth and to signal to a possible passing plane. They are eventually rescued hours before they would have frozen to death. Sym has to come to grips with all that she has discovered about her former Uncle Victor and how his influence warped her life and sense of self.
The narrative devices used by McCaughrean like the inner dialogue between Sym and Titus were at first hard to get used to. It was difficult to suspend disbelief that at fourteen she could have such intense feelings for an imaginary voice. Their conversations, italicized in the text sometimes seemed to take away from the action of the story. Others who have read this title have mentioned their inability to understand how she could have mistaken Victor for a genius instead of seeing him for the nutcase he really was. After the revelations he made about her father and her hearing though, the reader really gets a sense of the extent of his manipulation. If she had grown up her entire life with one picture of him, a few weeks, even ones that challenged her to the extreme would not have instantly made her suspect otherwise. I think teens may find her imaginary friend ridiculous and put down the book for that reason alone. Only a dedicated reader could plow through the agony of realizing what is happening before Sym does in the last 150 pages or so. I would rate this a 3Q and a 2P on the VOYA scale for these reasons. The mysterious all white title with the washed out face on the cover may intrigue readers, but only the persistent will make it past that. It would be appropriate for Middle and Senior High of both sexes. Readers, if determined, should read Sym’s story in a warm place so as not to be dragged into the frigid arctic world with her.
