Beryl, a successful nature photographer, lands the job of photographing polar bears in the arctic from the vantage point of a small metal cage. The expedition is run by a major nature magazine, professional in every way, but not by any means safe. Beryl wins the job because she is small enough to fit in the cage. There are three men on this trip, two photographers and a young guide, and together they endure (up to a point) a stake-out from a custom-built bus that is meant to last two weeks. When things go wrong, very early in the trip, Beryl and company must get back to civilization, by foot, without the cage.Beryl, short, shy, and generally uncomfortable with people, has a sense of beauty as wide and mysterious as the Arctic itself. She passionately loves the bears, the sky, the colors present in all of the surrounding white. She sleeps, she dreams, and she thrives. The bears themselves are incredible. It is a great story, brilliantly written.However, before leaving their little base of Churchill, Manitoba, they visit the town dump to watch the hungry bears eat sofas, metal lockers, trash of al sorts. The author does something to a young bear that made me close the book and put it in the return stack for the library. Before I actually returned it, though, bored with other books and still under the spell of the north, I retrieved it and skipped around before resuming the story from a place safely after the dump. I'm glad I did. But my investment in the novel changed. Without this incident, I would certainly have rated it 5 stars.
This book.....wow. I am so close to giving it 5 stars. I have rarely been so compelled to read on, to see these characters through one of the most harrowing, unimaginable experiences I've ever encountered in fiction. While I was in the final chapters, where things really "heat up" (as much as things can "heat up" in the Arctic Circle), I was trembling, really trembling, with tension from the suspense, drama, danger, and fear I felt on behalf of these characters. They're "real people" in that they're pretty well fleshed out, believable, relatable--especially Beryl (the protagonist) and David (a companion photographer on the same expedition). Short book, page-turner in some places (especially at the end, as I've mentioned), nicely thoughtful but still well-paced character study in other places. Schulman is one of the masters of matching physicality to character, of making this reader, at least, truly feel present in her characters' lives.
