Ice Island (review)

Thirteen-year-old Tatum may be a relative newcomer to Nome, Alaska, but she's devoted to the sport of dogsledding, and she's thrilled when her friend Beryl, a several-time Iditarod participant, gives Tatum her retired lead dog, Bandit. Fortunately, Tatum's able to take Bandit along when she and her mother travel to the isolated island of San Ysabel, just off the Russian coast, where she gradually makes friends with Cole, a Siberian Yupik boy. When she and Cole head out for a dogsledding excursion, savage weather pins them down, and their pleasure trip turns into a fight for survival. The setting dominates the story here, with the remote island, predominantly populated by the Yupik, home to a way of life very different even from that of Nome; Tatum is an effective focal point as an enthusiastic and adaptable newbie who nonetheless carries her own baggage into the situation (she's got a sentimentality about animals that clashes with the locals' pragmatism). Stylistically, though, the writing is often choppy and amateurish, shoehorning explanations into dialogue and lacking clarity on some key points (it's tough to piece together the family's history outside of Alaska, for instance), and characterization remains thin. The adventure has an appealing accessibility nonetheless, and readers looking for an old-fashioned survival story in an unusual locale may wish to mush along with Tatum.