This book is definitely the most fun you will have in Antarctica all year. Maisie Macleod’s Dad has to take her along on his brief trip to Antarctica during school holidays. While it’s winter in Britain it’s summer at the South Pole. But a plane crash means they are stranded and it’s MAISIE VS ANTARCTICA.
Maisie starts with the small plane about to crash land on the ice and skips back, remembering her manners, to introduce herself properly. She and her Dad, George, are British, and he writes guidebooks like How to Crash Land a Plane, although he’s never taken flying lessons. How to Defuse A Bomb, although… you get the picture. They live a quiet life, some would say boring, but Maisie likes jigsaws, or pretends she does. To keep busy she’s scribbling fantasy stories about a ghost pirate queen called Nyteshade, who leads a much more exciting life.
Back to the trip. Having flown many hours to Argentina, Dad turns out to be a fluent Spanish speaker, to his daughter’s surprise. He has a lot of tricks up his sleeve, as she is about to discover. On the next leg, from Ushuaia, the cheerful pilot Guillermo, who loves Maisie’s red hair, is incapacitated by a flock of birds hitting the tiny plane. Dad has to crash-land the plane. On sea ice, so there’s nothing but water beneath them. And it seems Guillermo filed a flight plan listing South Georgia Island, instead. Nobody knows they are here. The radio doesn’t work. Can they survive – with or without the expectation of rescue? Dad says to keep calm and does his best. At the very least, it’ll be educational for Maisie.
Our eleven-year-old friend is a splendid protagonist. Her written stories don’t take over pages, for which I was relieved, but Nyteshade could be said to be a stand-in for her late mother, a heroine figure she knows only in her imagination. As her mother died when she was a baby, Maisie never got to know her, so the tale looks at parenting and responsibility in this small family. Dad could have hired a nanny and spent all day at work, but he chose to raise his little girl. Now they get to participate together in one of his fact-finding trips that reveals a great deal more facts than expected. Such as the life of emperor penguins, how to build igloos, and who, if anyone, does live in the Antarctic Peninsula.
MAISIE VS ANTARCTICA by Jack Jackman contains some elements of fantasy, with entirely convincing reactions and well-thought-out situations. If Maisie and Dad have another adventure, I want to be along for the ride.
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