Shackleton's Man Goes South

I chose the YA Cli-Fi book known as Shackleton's Man Goes South, written by Tony White. My first impressions were that the story would revolve around the journey of one man or a few people to the southern tip of Earth, Antarctica. Maybe the topic of climate change would serve in the background of the story; I feel like I had a loose idea of what to expect. However, my experience with it has been much different. In fact, the author occasionally abandons the fictional story and sets off telling a new one in the non-fictional world. Climate change is in the foreground of the reading, but I found Tony White's method of exploring its issues to be very strange and not very young-adult focused.

Most of the book is a flip-flop between a fictional story and a nonfictional account of scientists' opinions on the extent of climate change, and the first time that it happens will probably come across as a little jarring to the reader, because it certainly left me a little taken aback. In the fictional portion of the story, a woman and her daughter, Emily and Jenny, are fleeing as refugees to one of the only habitable and safe parts of the world, Antarctica. I really appreciated how the author can tell a fictional story with fictional events but in a believable way that feels grounded.

The science journalism aspect of the book is hitting the nail right on the head with what White wants to discuss with climate change, even if it disrupts the flow of the narrative a bit. Besides getting some interviews with contemporary scientists, the book also delves into some of the business with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

White was inspired by some supposed stories of the real Earnest Shackleton, who tried to make it to the South Pole and failed, but saved some people in his open boat in sailing from Antarctica to South Georgia. He wanted to explore what would happen if the entire Antarctic ice sheet melted, which would be the last hope for refugees escaping the climate disasters all over the rest of the world. It has some parallels to stories of refugees who flee their countries due to political or economic turmoil, except in this this case people are leaving their homes for a more habitable area.

Here are a few quotes:

• "The travelers could smell the potent and unmistakable human cocktail carried to them across miles of ocean (10).
•  "It felt as if they were at the centre of some chaotic universe of sound created by so much humanity on the move and this vicious wind that whipped and tore and rattled at everything" (17).