The Arctic Fury

I was expecting some sort of gritty survival tale using the Franklin expedition story as a framework. Instead, I got a barely lukewarm courtroom drama where Virginia herself has very little impact. Just a disappointment all around.

Virginia is tasked by Lady Franklin to find her husband, with a crew of all women. Lady Franklin has something to prove by using women, ostensibly because they're more thorough than men (something mentioned outright in the beginning of the book). We get a ragtag crew of women of various stripes and backgrounds, including Caprice, whose family is bankrolling the expedition and who is also a rich girl with a mountaineering background. Virginia and Caprice get along for most of the book like oil and water, until on the ice when suddenly after just a few sentences spoken together, they're friends. Tragedy strikes on the ice though, and Virginia finds herself being tried as a murderer for her actions taken while trying to keep everyone safe.

It's a story told in two points of time; the days leading up to and during the expedition to find Franklin, and the period after they return with Virginia on trial. The majority of the chapter POVs are from Virginia herself, but we do occasionally get a chapter or two from some of the other side characters where we get a sense of their backstories and motivations for being there. None of these really made an impact on me though, because other than these brief chapters, all the women felt largely the same in writing.

I didn't care for this book at all. For one, the history this is supposedly built on isn't really used at all in the story beyond giving the author a point in time to write about. I'm fairly familiar with the Franklin expedition, and beyond maybe the cairn of canned goods they find at some point with some throwaway lines about the food being potentially tainted, nothing else is really mentioned about it. If you're going to use an existing historical event as your jumping off point, I feel like more should be done to integrate it into the story.

I also felt like the actual arctic expedition part was glossed over entirely too much. I was expecting some sort of gritty survival tale, but we get entirely too much shipboard drama, and too little actual expedition once they go ashore. Most of the winter is handwaved away, and is mentioned but not shown. The trial afterward, however, feels more like the crux of this book, and it was lukewarm at best. Virginia had very little sway over the events of the trial, which made it just a day-by-day recitation of people lining up to shame her, not a very compelling thing.

All of that combined made it just boring to get through. I don't know who I'd recommend this to, since neither the historical aspect nor the fictional aspect were all that great.