Probably more of a 3.5, they need half stars on this app! It was interesting to hear the narrative of the expedition, I would've loved to hear more about Ada Blackjack! I was invested in the professor, but when I found out that was a fictional addition, I thought it was unnecessary. ( )

I REALLY wanted to like this book - I love graphic novels, I love survival stories, I especially love Arctic survival stories, so this seemed like it was perfect for me.

But, as the consensus seems to be, Healy should have stuck with the two real stories and abandoned Sully, his fictional professor caught in an affair with a student. Sully's storyline has nothing to do with the other two (even with the tenuous Steffanson connection, since Steffanson plays hardly a role Robert's story and not at all in Ada's). While they grow and become stronger people, Sully just mopes around and then makes a sudden and unexpected decision at the end.

I like the tri-color aspect of the storytelling, but the characters are too blocky and static for me. I did learn about Ada Blackjack, who was a mystery to me, so at least I got something out of it. Not terrible but not really recommended. ( )

It was okay. Worth a read almost entirely for the art style: simple but striking, colorful but bleak. I really liked how the dialogue bubbles showed a character hearing a language he couldn’t understand with a fuzzy black line (like a swipe of a square charcoal stick) in place of words, and the characters’ expressions convey a lot of emotion with just a few careful lines. I liked the sound effects, too (MOOOAAARR is a great polar bear roar).

The stories didn’t seem to knit together very well, and just when something was about to get interesting, it switched back to the modern storyline which seemed kind of forced and not very relevant to the true historical stories being told (also, excuse me for not caring as much about the struggles of a fictional tenured professor who got in trouble for sleeping with a student as I do about the real-world survival story of Ada Blackjack, an indigenous woman who lived for two years on an island full of polar bears and then endured her rescuers exploiting her story for their own benefit!!!!) ( )

I might have enjoyed the three individual storylines if they were separated and expanded into their own books, but the three combined under one cover made for a muddled, confusing and unsatisfying read. File this under intriguing failure. ( )