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I have been in love with Titus Oates for quite a while now--which is ridiculous, since he's been dead for ninety years. But look at it this way. In ninety years I'll be dead, too, and the age difference won't matter.

Sym is not your average teenage girl. She is obsessed with the Antarctic and the brave, romantic figure of Captain Oates from Scott's doomed expedition to the South Pole. In fact, Oates is the secret confidant to whom she spills all her hopes and fears.

But Sym's uncle Victor is even more obsessed--and when he takes her on a dream trip into the bleak Antarctic wilderness, it turns into a nightmarish struggle for survival that will challenge everything she knows and loves.

In her first contemporary young adult novel, Carnegie Medalist and three-time Whitbread Award winner Geraldine McCaughrean delivers a spellbinding journey into the frozen heart of darkness.

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The White Darkness Chapter One "Titus" I have been in love with Titus Oates for quite a while now--which is ridiculous, since he's been dead for ninety years. But look at it this way. In ninety years I'll be dead, too, and then the age difference won't matter. Besides, he isn't dead inside my head. We talk about all kinds of things. From whether hair color can change spontaneously to whether friends are better than family, and the best age for marrying: 14 or 125. Generally speaking, he knows more than I do, but on that particular subject we are even. He wasn't married--at least, he wasn't when he died, which must have substantially cut down his chances. Uncle Victor says I shouldn't marry at all. Uncle Victor knows about these things and he says that "marriage is a bourgeois relic of Victorian sentimentality." That suits me. No one would match up to Titus. And we have a kind of understanding, Titus and I. Uncle Victor is marvelous. He's done so much for us--for Mum and me, I mean. And anyway, he's just so clever. Uncle Victor knows a fantastic amount. He knows at what temperature glass turns to liquid, and where Communism went wrong and how the Clifton Suspension Bridge was built and just what the Government ought to be doing; you can't fault him. He's read books about everything: history, geography, politics, astrology, animals . . . the Fount of All Knowledge, Dad used to call him. I would get stuck doing my homework, and Dad would say, "Ask the Fount of All Knowledge." And I'd telephone Victor and he would tell me. Quite often he knew more than the teachers, so they'd think I'd got my homework wrong, but as Victor says, "What teachers don't understand is that the body of learning is still growing. They reckon it stopped the day they came out of college. That, or they're plain ignorant. Lot of ignorance in yon schools." It's true that none of my teachers knows much about Antarctica. When Dad and Victor and I went to Iceland, one of the teachers had been, too, and knew all about Dettifoss and the hot springs and people having stinking saunas in their backyards. But none of the teachers at school has been to Antarctica. Some of them know about Scott of the Antarctic going to the South Pole and not coming back. But they mostly mean John Mills in the movie. I don't. In the general way of things, I don't know much about anything. Uncle Victor says I'm "the victim of a shoddy education system." But I do know about the Polar Regions. The bookshelves over my bed are full of books about the North and South Poles. Icebound almost. A glacial cliff face teetering over my bed. I remember, the night after Dad had been rushed into the hospital, one of the shelves sheared off and crashed down on me. I woke up thinking the house was collapsing--books gouging at my head, bouncing off the bed frame, slapping flat on the floor. I looked at the hole in the wall and the brackets on the pillow and I didn't know what to do. About the shelf. About anything. So I went back to sleep, and dreamed that I was sailing toward the Ross Ice Shelf, and that crags were splitting off its face, plunging down, massive as seagoing liners foundering. Come to think of it, Uncle Victor gave me most of my ice books. Every birthday and Christmas. Books about The Ice and the North Pole; about Shackleton and Scott, Laurence Gould and Vivian Fuchs, Nansen and Barents, Franklin and Peary; about penguins and polar bears, whales and seals and boreales . . . About Captain Lawrence Oates--the one they called "Titus." Uncle Victor understands how the whole idea creeps up on you like pack ice--pressing in and pressing against your head, then crushing the hull and tumbling inside. . . . If we ever did a project at school on Antarctica, I could shine. Like Mount Erebus in mid-summer, I could, I could shine! Except that I don't think I would choose to. It's all bound up with Titus, and I know better than to mention Titus at school. I do now, anyway. I made that mistake once. I won't do it again. "Symone has a pretend friend! Symone has a pretend friend!" It was the conversation about kissing--or snogging, as they invariably call it. Like the ant nest in the larder: You think you've done everything to be rid of it--that it can't possibly come back again--but there it is: "How many boys have you snogged?" There is no right answer. You say "none" and you're sad and frigid or they know someone whose brother would be willing to snog you for cash. You refuse to answer and you are sadder still--or hiding something, or prefer girls, or . . . It's not that they care; they only want to tell you how many they've snogged--chiefly because they like saying the word. It makes them feel as if they are wearing red underwear. But on and on they go: "How many boys, Sym? How many boys have you snogged?" Why is it that all the words to do with sex are ugly? Words to do with love aren't. No wonder Titus thought women were a nuisance. No wonder he died without ever . . . getting mixed up with all that. Anyway, I said that I could do without it. (At least that's what I tried to say. I don't explain things very well out loud.) I tried to say that I was happy to stick with imagining for the time being, thanks all the same. Later, maybe. If I ever met anyone who could compare with Titus . . . And after that I was the mad girl--sad, frigid, and mad, all three--the retard who had an imaginary friend: "Like little kids do, oo-hoo. Like little kids do!" The White Darkness . Copyright © by Geraldine McCaughrean. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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Library Journal Review

A lifelong love of Antarctica puts a sheltered 14-year-old in grave danger in this 2008 Printz Award winner. Symone's hearing disability and disinterest in boys alienate her from her peer group. Her only friend is Capt. Laurence "Titus" Oates, a long-dead victim of Robert Falcon Scott's 1912 expedition to the South Pole. She will need his expertise when her Uncle Victor invites her along on his own polar exploration. Cold Weather Appeal: Be sure to crank up the furnace. Between the freezing temperatures and the vast white landscape, frostbite is a real reading hazard. Why It Is for Us: Fans of Paul Theroux's The Mosquito Coast will recognize Uncle Victor's particular form of madness long before our heroine does. At the 2008 ALA Conference, Printz committee members sported buttons featuring an image of the real Captain Oates declaring "Titus is a hottie." The imaginary relationship between Symone and Titus is so very sweet that you may think so, too.-Angelina Benedetti (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Symone, 14, narrates McCaughrean's (Peter Pan in Scarlet) tale about the trip of a lifetime gone horribly wrong. Hearing-impaired and unpopular, Sym appreciates the attentions of "Uncle" Victor, her dead father's business partner and the family's seeming benefactor. Victor, an eccentric genius obsessed with proving the discredited Hollow Earth theories of John Symmes, has fostered in Sym a lifelong fascination with Antarctica. Indeed, Sym's only companion is an imaginary friend, Lawrence "Titus" Oates, who perished in 1912 during Captain Robert Scott's ill-fated expedition to the South Pole. Sym is thrilled when Victor spirits her off for an impromptu trip to Paris, which morphs-incredibly-into a trek to Antarctica, as the two join a crowd of rich tourists for a guided look at "The Ice's" astounding landscape. Victor aligns with Manfred Bruch, a purported Norwegian filmmaker, and his son. Guests and guides alike become mysteriously ill, and the tour is cut short, but the plane intended to return the group to safety explodes. After Victor's "nice cup of tea" induces sleep in everyone else, the four abscond on Victor's mad quest for Symmes's Hole. The heroine's relentless self-deprecation, a necessary element of her unconditional acceptance of Victor, is nonetheless somewhat overplayed. But the ratcheting terror, thrilling double-crosses and gorgeously articulated star character-Antarctica itself-combine for a girl's adventure yarn of the first order. Ages 12-up. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

School Library Journal Review

Gr 7 Up-As with Not the End of the World (HarperTempest, 2005), McCaughrean weaves a tale of obsession and personal growth against the backdrop of nature's unrelenting power. Fourteen-year-old Sym Wates is fascinated with the Antarctic and the men who explored it, even to the point of creating an internal confidante in the form of Captain Lawrence "Titus" Oates, who was part of the doomed Scott expedition 90 years earlier. So when her "Uncle" Victor whisks the painfully shy, hearing-impaired teen away on a surprise trip to the South Pole, it seems like a dream come true. But Victor has his own agenda, seeking the legendary Symmes's Hole, portal to the interior of a hollow Earth. The lengths to which the madman pursues this quest provide the book with a dramatic drive and powerful revelations. Sym makes for an engaging (if occasionally melodramatic) narrator, although aspects of her character, such as her hearing loss, are not fully developed. An afterword on Scott's expedition in 1911 is included.-Christi Voth, Parker Library, CO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Fourteen-year-old Symone's only friend is an imaginary incarnation of Captain Laurence Titus Oates, an explorer who accompanied Robert Scott on his failed expedition to the South Pole. Sym is passionate about the Antarctic and her infatuation is fed by Uncle Victor, an eccentric family friend who has cared for Sym and her mother since Sym's father's death. When Victor surprises Sym with a trip to the Ice, she has some doubts, especially when she discovers that her mother can't come. But her excitement overshadows her initial misgivings--until realizes that Uncle Victor has an obsession of his own that runs deeper than the glaciers and threatens her life. It's not always clear whether Titus' voice is imagined or if it's meant to be shy, bookish Sym's only link to the outside world, but McCaughrean's lyrical language actively engages the senses, plunging readers into a captivating landscape that challenges the boundaries of reality. Best suited to older, better readers despite the age of the protagonist, this imaginative, intellectually demanding novel offers plenty of action. --Jennifer Hubert Copyright 2006 Booklist

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Geraldine McCaughrean was born in Enfield, England on June 6, 1951. She was educated at Christ Church College, Canterbury. She has written more than 160 books and plays for children and adults.

Her writing career includes the retelling of such classics as One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, The Canterbury Tales, and The Bronze Cauldron: Myths and Legends of the World, which is a collection of stories from all over the world. She has received numerous awards including three Whitbread Children's Book Awards for A Little Lower Than the Angels, Gold Dust, and Not the End of the World. She also received the Guardian Prize and Carnegie Medal for A Pack of Lies, the Beefeater Children's Novel Award for Gold Dawn, the Michael L. Printz Award for The White Darkness, and the 2018 Carnegie Medal for children's and YA books for her middle-grade novel Where the World Ends.

(Bowker Author Biography)