Ice Diaries: A Memoir

A desolate polar landscape comes to life in this memorable book chronicling McNeil's (Private View) period as writer-in-residence for the British Antarctic Survey, focusing on her four months in Antarctica. Having signed on to witness scientific research, McNeil struggles with her own insignificance in Antarctica's vastness. This is not a traditional explorer's diary, but rather, as McNeil explains, "an exploration of an inner as much as an outer landscape." McNeil uses this memoir to delve into climate change concerns and her own past, including some childhood trauma. When the author allows herself to roam freely in her experiences, the book is absorbing. Its fractured structure and time line %E2%80%94not "a single line, a narrative" but rather "a spiral"%E2%80%94can be jarring for the reader, as reference points and dates are not always clear. The book also lacks a traditional conclusion, but this may be a purposeful and maddening acknowledgment that for both personal trials and the greater environmental problems plaguing the earth, no satisfactory solutions have yet to be discovered. Overall, the book succeeds in bringing the issues of climate change out of the scientific and into the literary world, elegantly weaving factual information into a language more broadly understood. Agent: Veronique Baxter, David Hingham Associates. (Mar.)