book review: The White Darkness

taken from Goodreads:

"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."

I picked this novel up because it won the 2008 Printz Award; I've found that most of my favorite YA novels have either won this award or been listed as an honor book. However, I'm of two minds about this one.

On one hand, the book is beautifully written. McCaughrean brings a completely alien landscape, Antarctica, to life through a series of compelling sensory images; the description is eerie and atmospheric, and the novel is at its best when Sym (the main character) is caught up in her surroundings. This, after all, is a place that she knows better than anything else -- it's obvious that she's more comfortable lost in this white wilderness than she is middle school or even home.

And that's what is most disturbing about this novel -- the fact that Sym could be so oblivious and socially inept that she can't even tell when she's being manipulated. What's more disturbing is the fact that Sym has been manipulated almost her entire life, and the idea that she actually IS aware of what's going on but has chosen to block it out (through the creation of a character in her head?) makes this novel potentially unbearable. At first, I thought Sym was just odd, but as events continued to pile up and it became obvious to me what was going on, I got bothered by how she continued to ignore what was really happening. In the end, that's what bothered me most; I felt terrible for Sym, for all the things that were done to her; but I also felt as though she LET those things happen by simply ignoring them and retreating into her head, and I just couldn't fully get behind a character that would do that.