The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean

When I read this book and saw the cover, I was expecting a thrilling fantasy and adventure to an unknown place. I was entirely wrong. I found the book extremely unclear and I found it not at all gripping. I wouldn’t encourage anyone to read this ‘slow moving’ book; it will crush your interests in reading.
Firstly, the characters in this novel are at an extreme difference to normal people. For instance; Sym or Symone, the narrator, is 14 and she wears a hearing aid that she can’t hear without. Also she has an imaginary ‘friend’ called Titus Oates, a polar explorer that travels with her everywhere.
Her uncle Victor, as well as taking care of her family after her father died, believes in a world that lives inside our own Earth and he wants to travel there and prove his theory. If this doesn’t prove the madness that runs through the characters in the book then I don’t know what would.
Secondly, the slow movement of the book. For example, Uncle Victor, Sym and some other explorers were travelling on the ice trying to find this other world for 210 pages, nearly the whole book. In this time they encountered maybe 3 problems and had a good old chat. These things filled the whole book, problems and chat.
Finally, this book is full of the same thing over and over again. In nearly every chapter on the ice, there’s the group walking over ice and whiteness, and if you’re lucky, an encounter with a problem. The same things happen all the time; this makes the book extremely hard to connect with.
Overall, the book was filled with the same plot on every page. The same structure and the same events. White Darkness was filled with... white darkness. A blank book that had no emotion, exciting plot or interesting characters. A white darkness that lacked importance or entertainment, a books purpose is to entertain and this one failed. It was a poor attempt to grip the reader and interest an audience.

HG Year 9