Helpful Score: 1
If you enjoy a story that begins with dread and foreboding and quickly dissolves into despair and utter hopelessness then this is the book for you. I've never read an Arctic seafaring story set in the 19th Century that did not end badly and this is no exception. Still, the writing is outstanding, the characters well defined and the descriptions of the landscape often border on poetry. There is a lot of blood but for me the most harrowing account was not a human murder, but a whale hunt and the aftermath. Definitely worth reading but not for the squeamish, animal lovers, ecologists or optimists.
