The Ice Maiden

By: Sara Sheridan

Narrated by: Charlotte Strevens

1842. Stranded on Deception Island in the South Atlantic, her whaling captain husband lost at sea, Karina is destitute and desperate. Disguised as a cabin boy, she stows away on a British ship. But Karina is about to get a nasty surprise.

As she grows closer to ship's surgeon Joseph Hooker, Karina and the rest of the crew find themselves pushed to the limits both physically and emotionally as conditions worsen on board. Engulfed in the chillingly hostile Antarctic landscape, something extraordinary happens - and Karina's story becomes intertwined with some of the 20th century's bravest polar explorers....

©2018 Sara Sheridan (P)2019 Oakhill Publishing

REALLY falls apart and gets weird in the middle.

This story started off quite interesting. It is based on a woman who stows away on a exploring ship in the year 1840 or so.The heroine behaves and thinks far more like a woman of that time would in comparison to many other swashbuckling heroines that today's writing seems to favour.

But...just when one gets to know the characters, and care about some of them, the story short-circuits and the other HALF of the book is bizarre; to me anyway. I kept skipping through boring and strange parts thinking it would somehow change and complete the first half of the book, but it didn't. I felt as though the story had just stopped and another started.

The narration was adequate although the performer does not do accents very well. The, Danish? characters (she doesn't actually nail down from where the woman comes) sound African. The Scotsman is the exception, he sounds believable.

I'm afraid I was very disappointed and puzzled. It was as though two books were slapped together.