Antarctica – Escape from Disaster

Peter Lerangis's Escape from Disaster is a survival adventure for 11 year olds about an expedition ship crushed in the Antarctic ice and a crew left stranded on the floes.

What happens

It's January 1910. The American expedition's South Pole trek is over, and their ship, the Mystery, is stuck fast in pack ice. Everyone is desperate to get home to New York. Then the ice splits the hull open and the ship starts to break apart around them.

What follows is gripping. The crew camp on the ice, strip the wreck for wood and rebuild four lifeboats (they use boiled seal's blood as glue). Then they drag them north by hand, hoping to reach open water before winter comes. Some of the dogs bolt and never come back.

The chapters take turns between different people, and that's what makes it. Andrew is sixteen, a bookworm who wants the men to stop treating him like a child. His stepbrother Colin is the strong one everyone now looks up to, and he finds Andrew very hard to like. Their dad Jack is trying to hold a frightened crew together.

Then there's Philip, a rich runaway who has stolen money from a bank in London. While everyone else hacks at the ice, he's busy stuffing banknotes into three coats. He's snobbish and very funny and he isn't quite as useless as he seems.

Under the adventure there's something sadder. Both brothers have lost their mothers, and a lot of the prickliness between them comes from grief they don't talk about. It gives the whole thing real feeling.

Some bits are tough, so here's the plain version. A leopard seal bursts up through a crack in the ice, grabs Andrew's leg and tries to drag him under. The men beat it until the water turns red, and his injury is described. There's frostbite, a crewman whose mind is giving way, and the main characters are teenagers, older than the readers on this shelf. For a child who's squeamish about injuries or animals being hurt, it could be too much.

For a reader who loves true-feeling survival stories, snow and ships and impossible odds, it's hard to put down.

What to read next

It follows on from an earlier book about the same expedition, so if they're new to the Winslows, Journey to the Pole is where the brothers set off from New York.