Written by JACK JACKMAN
Hello, and welcome to my latest Read & Review, featuring this week a chilling Antarctic adventure in Middle-Grade Fiction.
Without further ado, and with my trusty housekeeper, Mrs H, standing poised beside a team of huskies and sledge with a tube of seal repellant in hand, let's shout MUSH and launch off into first-in-series review of a blindingly brilliant adventure . . .
AUTHOR: Jack Jackman
Illustrations by: Marco Guadalupi
Published by: Nosy Crow
Publication date Paperback: 10 October 2024
Paperback 13 digit ISBN: 978-1805131359
UK Cover price for Paperback: £7.99
Amazon KINDLE price: £6.98
Pages: 256
Age range: 8-12 and upwards
Any dogs or cats? No, a few other beasties from the Antarctic waste and waters.
SPOILER ALERT
Yes, as to plot direction and characters.
Thank you to...
We are exceedingly grateful to Hannah Prutton, Nosy Crow Publishers, and Net Galley for offering us this fantastic adventure for our Read & Review.
As ever, our views are our own, and we only share reviews of books we have bought, received as gifts, or received in exchange for an impartial review.
First and foremost, the books we review are those we select to read, like, and feel our global readers deserve to know about and that we hope they, their family, friends and students will enjoy.
The plot
BANG! That's how we are thrown into Maisie's adventure, and for three stunning, breath-freezing pages, Maisie recounts her plight. How the Spanish-speaking pilot, Guillermo, is slumped over and her boring jigsaw-loving father, who has never piloted a plane, even though he has written a book on How to Crash Land a Plane, is fighting at the controls of a light aircraft as it plunges to certain death and disaster.
Then, as things change from blue to white, Maisie then takes us back to how she finds herself in this plight. It is ultimately all down to a babysitter's son choosing to flood his home, building a moat for his Lego castle. It is the Christmas holidays, and her dad is off to do research on how to survive in the Antarctic. A quick in and out, staying a day between. His other books work along the lines of How to Build a Zip Wire, How to Wrestle a Crocodile and How to Defuse a Bomb. None of which he has ever done or had the time to do, what with looking after Maisie on his own after his wife died.
But, the upshot is that rather than not go, Maisie sees a chance to have a small adventure to make her Christmas holiday break for once sound fabulous rather than dull when she recounts it to class come term time. Little does she know what awaits, and that's excluding the plane crash.
When we rejoin after this little foray back in time, Maisie finds herself alive and on the ice. Guillermo is alive and wounded, but her father is OK. Of the plane, there is no sign, but her father says it is further along the ice.
It soon becomes clear that nobody will be coming for them as their flight is illegal. They shouldn't have been flying to Antarctica and had filed a flight plan to somewhere else. Additionally, Guillermo's battered plane doesn't have a working radio.
Pretty soon, after some help and chewing things over, Maisie and her dad set to making an igloo. A much better one than those semi-built igloos Maisie finds out on the ice. But where did they come from if nobody lives there? They drag the pilot under cover, and in doing so, Maisie notes that they leave trails in the snowy ice. Yet, there are no trails from when her father dragged the pilot to safety from the plane.
They have priorities, and having built a shelter and retrieved a stove from his rucksack, the next is food. Now, this is where some fun info about penguins comes in as father and daughter head off to find some fish. And where there are penguins, you'll find fish. But where you find penguins near the edge of an ice flow, you'll also find peril that will eat a small, overly-hasty girl, no matter the time of day.
The beast is as surprised by missing his target as Maisie is at still being alive and not in its jaws when the former and the latter face each other on the ice flow with a healthy distance between them. Has she just been teleported? It seems like she has, and maybe it isn't the first time, either. Could it be that they all survived the plane crash because none of them were on the plane when it did crash? Is her father an actual superhero with teleport skills?
It is a suggestion that her level-headed (dull) father says isn't possible. But as they say in the state of Denmark, something is very fishy indeed. And Maisie is determined to find out what it is.
When Guillermo is awake, he lends Maisie his much food-stained map. It is on this they discover Antarctica isn't as uninhabited as they thought. Right about a cigarette burn through the map is a British scientific research base. It's thirty kilometres away, too far to walk in a day, especially in cold weather and icy winds.
Which is when Maisie's dad heads off to use the plane's radio. But after he has gone out, Guillermo says he'll have a hard time fixing it as he left the radio in the aerodrome!
What happens next is, well, surprising. Chasing after her dad, Maisie ultimately finds him asleep on the ice, his head on a snow pillow. His clothes are in tatters, and he is injured. What has happened to him? And more's the point, when asked if he got the radio working, the one that wasn't there, he says it didn't work properly so he left a message instead! Could he be delusional, or has the mystery just dialled up a notch?
Which is where Mrs H has plucked the metaphoric pen from my paws and insisted I stop the review. Suffice it to say, at less than halfway through this adventure, and having not revealed everything that has happened up to this point, I have most definitely left the best to last.
So, what did we think? SPOILERS
Talk about starting the book with a bang. This one literally threw us head-first into a nosedive plane crash in the Antarctic, and the adrenaline created fuelled us to the end. Such clever writing. We loved how so very neatly, after the shock of the first three pages, we rewound and brought ourselves up to speed in the preceding few days, not that speed was lacking anywhere.
I thought we had the plot and outcome pegged, but we were both totally wrong. To tell you exactly what is going on, the actual driver behind actions and incidents will ruin the book. Despite being considered by some a not-too-bright child with her head in fantasy land, Maisie is clued up and observant. Alas, this isn't matched with either being able to keep a secret or necessarily think things through.
But that's exactly what brings this book alive without being cliched. Coupled with some really cool facts about the Antarctic, first-hand experience with some of the inhabitants, and most delightful characters, such as their one-time pilot, we have an excellent, fast-paced adventure that would make Clive Cussler proud. In fact, I'd peg him as having written this had it been an anonymous work.
So . . . .
Crunch time.
"A barnstorming, rollercoaster adventure filled with wry humour, thrills, spills, peril and mystery. One hell of a ride, and I just couldn't stop till the end, and left wanting more."
Want to buy a copy?
To get a copy, dodging crevasses, toothy-grinned sea beasts, and slightly shady Spanish-speaking pilots, head to your local book stockist. Or why not try their online ordering service.
Jack Jackman's author web page can be found HERE or type this: https://nosycrow.com/contributor/jack-jackman/
Marco Guadalupi's Instagram account page can be found HERE or type https://www.instagram.com/marcoguadalupi85/
Nosy Crow's web page can be found HERE or type this: https://nosycrow.com/
And now for my Sunday Selfie . . . .
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| © Erin the Cat Princess |
Here is me taking a snooze having finished the review of book two in this series. Tune in in a fortnight to read all about MAISIE vs the HIMALAYAS.
We are joining the Sunday Selfies, hosted by the wonderful Kitties Blue and their mum, Janet Blue, from the Cat on My Head blog in America. CLICK THIS LINK to visit their site and to get the code to add to your own blog . . .
I hope you enjoyed that adventure.
Till laters!
ERin
