The Polar Bear Explorer's Club
A book review.
The Polar Bear Explorer's Club
by Alex Bell
published: 2017
ISBN: 9780571332540
genre: Fantasy
reviewed:2021.06.02
My daughter (then aged eight) bought a copy of this book along with a couple of friends. She read about half of it but that wound down when she started finding too many unfamiliar words. So, I picked it up and read it to her from the beginning over the past few days.
The book starts slow with several pages of cringe/funny "rules" for the different explorer's clubs that exist in the unnamed world. We read the first 2-3 pages and then moved onto the story.
The plot revolves around a young girl being raised by an explorer in a hybrid steampunk/light magic setting but otherwise maybe 1912 or so. She was a foundling in the icy continent in the far north, and differs from the people of her adopted land by being albino. She's growing up in a marvelous home full of exotic creatures like chicken-sized dinos and a polar bear. She's keen to become an explorer herself but suffers from a dreadful case of being female and her insufferable aunt wants to derail her childhood by a stint at a boarding school or finishing school or something awful. It's a bit of a slow start to be honest and while my daughter was listening I got the sense that it required patience on her part. I stopped frequently for asides on vocabulary.
There's some art sprinkled throughout that helps a young reader focus their imagination.
But our heroine's father kicks things up by whisking his girl off on a planned expedition with his explorer's club and a second club. From here a rather good story (finally!) unfolds and before long our girl and three other squabbling children are lost in the frozen continent, separated by the adults and slowly stumbling through a Man In a Hole plotline that we both rather enjoyed. The characters are superbly crafted, the dialog is consistently great, and both the minor and major challenges faced by the kids are original. My daughter enjoyed guessing what was going on with the foreshadowed destiny for the heroine, and at one point was breathless with laughter after two failed rescue attempts intersect and set the four children to squabbling while hanging from a rope and expecting adversaries to descend at any moment. The tone is really quite good - except as noted below. One of the things I enjoyed was that story was consistently realistic for what it is - no great feats, no over-the-top heroism, no unbelievable chatter, just characters digging through a situation. It was a bit like reading an Ursula K le Guin book but scaled down a touch for kids.
This book is charmingly British, I found myself explaining some of the phrases and some of the ways that people are in that country. Most of the adults are not people you'd want to know, and I think that's why the story really takes off when they're out of the picture: the constant send-ups of patrician idiocy are fine but it's all too much on a sustained basis. (As realistic as it doubtless is; I'm glad I wasn't born that time or country.)