Stef Penney has written another love letter to the frozen landscapes of the north, this one an epic adventure starring an unforgettable female character who is unafraid of the almost inconceivable challenges life throws her way--as well as the challenges she often sets herself--despite the constraints placed on her sex by the traditions and mores of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century.UNDER A POLE STAR tells the story of Flora Mackie, who grows up on the decks of a whaling ship captained by her father, a widower. Seeing no reason why the young girl shouldn't accompany him on his trips, Flora's father introduces her to a life of adventure, discovery, and independence. It is a taste she will savor for the rest of her life. At a time when women weren't expected to do much more than raise a family and manage a household, Flora grows up to become a scientist and Arctic explorer as an adult, thriving in a world dominated by, and almost exclusively populated by, men.Framing this gorgeous book, which documents the all-consuming ambition that drove countless explorers to their deaths as they raced to find a way through the ice floes at the top of the planet, is an inquiry into the fates of two such men who risked everything for a chance to become the first to find his way to the North Pole. An inquisitive journalist accompanying an elderly Flora and several other scientists on their way to be filmed by a movie crew in 1948, begins to question the elderly Snow Queen, as she is now known, about the fates of Armitage and de Beyn. Because she knew them, didn't she, back in the day? Oh, did she ever!Then the book begins in earnest, tracing Flora's journey from girlhood to womanhood, and from apprentice to scientist and expedition leader. She is an amazing figure, if somewhat enigmatic to her mid-twentieth-century interlocutor, but the reader follows her every move as she slowly discovers what she is truly capable of. Her natural sympathies lie with the native peoples of the tundra, who have endured for countless generation despite living on the farthest boundaries of what was thought to be habitable by humankind; as a woman, she understands the fortitude required to survive and to thrive when the conditions around you are inimical to your heart's desires. Indeed, her exploration of the North is matched by her exploration of her heart's geography, and her discovery of how to love, of how to receive pleasure and how to give it, even though the context in which she comes to womanhood is rigged against her.This is a sumptuous, exciting book and I recommend it highly--Penney is a writer at the height of her powers and she has penned an incredible novel, filled with wisdom about the internal forces that drive us and the things that give us comfort. It is also the most convincingly sensual novel I have read in a long, long time.