Eric Walters returns with gusto to one of his favourite literary landscapes, the far North – this time as far north as it is possible to go. He also revisits a memorable character, Newfoundland Captain Robert Bartlett, the real-life hero of Walters’ award-winning 1997 novel, Trapped in Ice. Here again we get bone-cracking cold, unrelieved darkness, treacherous ice, and giant, yellow-fanged, heavy-breathing polar bears.

This is classic Walters: a good yarn, plenty of action, lively dialogue, and quirky details drawn from research. Like Bartlett, many characters in this new book – Walters’ 46th – are based on real people, including polar explorer Robert Peary and Peary’s black assistant, Matthew Hensen – who was, as Walters points out, very likely the first man actually to reach the North Pole. To these historical figures he adds the fictional Danny, a 14-year-old Newfoundland-born cabin boy. Captain Bartlett and Danny somewhat overshadow the extraordinary Hensen, much of whose factual history Danny shares: both were orphans and cabin boys, elevated from humble positions by their services to Peary.

Walters’ attitude to “great men” is skeptical, as it was in Trapped in Ice: Peary had the dream and the drive, but without Hensen, Bartlett, the Inuit, and their dogs, his dangerous quest for glory would never have succeeded. Walters approaches the issues of class and race more gingerly. The discussions about Hensen’s colour and the “heathen Natives” are surely more open-minded and egalitarian than was likely in 1909. However, in a book for young readers, who lack the context to judge the issues, this seems a wise approach.