Spoilers ahoy!

If it wasn’t for the whole sick child plot line, this would have been a very good book. I just couldn’t care about the kid or his pathetically drawn mother. Killed on their wedding day, Doug’s ‘obsession’ is taken up by his kid John. John is a real piece of work. Completely screwed up by both parents, he is unable to think for himself and when he’s largely responsible for Doug’s death, he takes off for parts unknown. To bury himself in ‘good works’ to try to atone for his actions and his hereto fucked up life.

His mother is a caricature. She is the stereotypical jealous ex-wife and smothering mother. She resented every bit of time Doug spent trying to find Franklin and his ships, even though she knew quite well what he was like before forcing him to marry her by getting pregnant with John. In the end, she helps Jo find John and the bone marrow transplant works and the brat Sam lives.

The really interesting part of the story had to do with Franklin. It is a perfectly true story that he and his two ships took off for the Arctic and were never seen or heard from again. Better than 50 other expeditions were sent behind him to search for survivors or evidence of their passing. Precious little was ever found. Their story is told through the fictional creation of Gus, a teenage boy who is the lowest on the totem pole for the voyage.

The two ships, Erebus and Terror set off with thousands of pounds of provisions, largely in cans, to discover the Northwest Passage. So arrogant are the Victorian English that they think they can do this easily. What is a little bit of ice and snow to the greatest colonizing nation on earth? Pah. With 3 years of supplies they leave. And they are never found. No one lives.

Such harsh conditions I’ve never heard of before. The temperature alone would have killed most people, but then there was the ice and the general lack of cleanliness or suitable food. The theory goes that the canned meat and other provisions were improperly canned and spoiled inside causing rampant botulism. The cans that were miraculously OK were soldered shut with lead.

The crew complained that they had symptoms far worse than the normal cases of scurvy that they had seen before. Officers had difficulty concentrating on any task like plotting a course or reading charts. Crewmembers were fatigued earlier and more severely than their work would have caused. Lead poisoning. Unknown at the time, but just as deadly.

Eventually, after almost 2 years locked in ice, the Erebus and the Terror were abandoned. By this time about 1/3 of the crew were dead and so was Captain Franklin. The next in command was in charge and he wanted to march some 400 miles to a more settled part of Canada. By this time, the men were severely poisoned and suffered from severe malnutrition. Scurvy was out of control. When Captain Crozier tried to suggest behaving like the native Inuits, the men scoffed at him that they had anything to learn from the ‘savages’. Crozier knew that the Inuit survived here and did quite well and that adopting their ways just might save their lives, but now it was too late for the arrogant Victorians.

Gus was the last survivor. Despite the unsanitary conditions and the deplorable food, he’d grown into a hard young man. But when he saw Crozier die before his eyes, his hero, he just lay down next to him and died too.

Another interesting bit was the story of the female Polar Bear, Swimmer. She and her cub were distracted by the ‘psychic’ echoes left by Franklin’s men. She somehow got off her normal seasonal course and was semi-stranded on the ice. She fought with a male bear who wanted to eat the weakened cub, and just when she thought she could get a break, along comes John and his boss photographer. John gets it into his head that he’d like to die by Polar Bear and approaches her. She goes for him and gets shot for her efforts to save her cub. John is unharmed. The cub is rescued.

A bit of symbolism was used in bone marrow. Bone marrow was needed to save Sam and bone marrow was what the last of Franklin’s men were reduced to. The bone marrow of those crewmen who had died before them. Crozier urges Gus to eat his marrow and push on. Gus is repulsed and even though he says he will eat of Crozier, he doesn’t. ( )

http://www.internetbookshop.it/code/9788845423055/mcgregor-elizabeth/figlio-dei-... ( )

I very much enjoyed this book.....story goes back and forth between the 1845 ill-fated Franklin expedition for the northwest passage and the modern day people studying the event. Tragedy strikes in both stories. I found the writing compelling and the story very much worth reading. ( )

This story, while it has little to do with the book description, actually was much better than I expected. It told the story of 'parents' of different times, sexes, and species all trying to find safety and salvation for their 'children.' It struck a deep cord and truly warmed my heart. ( )

Even Oprah would roll her eyes.

That’s the one thought rolling loop-de-loop in my brain as my eyes neared the end of their exhausting journey through The Ice Child’s 370-plus pages.

The other word that kept echoing in my inner ear was: Puh-leeze!

No, not even the talk-show book club diva would wish this contrived slop upon her legions of faithful book club readers. At first glance, the elements would seem ripe for La Winfrey to stamp her big O on the cover—there’s a mother who faces a Tough Life Crisis, there’s a race against time, there are tears, there’s empowerment. But there’s also a lot of bad, bad writing, most of which seems to have been hastily penned on the back of a sob-soaked tissue. Puh-leeze.

British author Elizabeth McGregor makes her American debut with this novel and while she obviously has a lot of enthusiasm and passion for her book and its characters, I cannot say the same after turning the last page with a sigh of relief. I’m sure McGregor would wish that her readers heave a sigh of satisfaction, and maybe some of them will. But those are the kind of readers whose hearts go pitter-pat when reading Danielle Steele and Anita Shreve or, even further back, Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart and Phyllis A. Whitney.

Yes, boys and girls, The Ice Child is retro-romance, all slopped up with modern briskness.

I’ve got to admire McGregor for one thing: she obviously spent a lot of time in dusty libraries, museum archives and the deepest reaches of cyberspace. The amount of research shows, as apparent as the neat-stitched seams on a baseball, at every turn in the novel. McGregor has taken on three stories here, all of them woven together under extremely tenuous similarities:

*the fate of the doomed Franklin party, the arctic expedition which searched for the Northwest Passage 150 years ago, then mysteriously vanished when the ships became ice-bound;

*a polar bear and her cub who are on an equally mysterious journey across the ice pack in the area where Franklin and his crew died;

*a modern London journalist named Jo who is on a desperate search for a bone marrow donor for her little boy.

Of those three plot strands, the only one I cared anything at all about was the portion devoted to the Franklin expedition. McGregor puts us right on board the two ships, the Terror and Erebus, and we feel the chill of the arctic, the pangs of starvation, the desperation of being hopelessly lost in an icebound landscape. I found myself wishing that McGregor had written only one of her three stories—this one. I was fascinated by the grueling fate of the men in the 1840s and wanted to read even more.

Here’s a taste of what to expect in the Franklin sections:

Terror sailed in Erebus’s wake, and barely had Erebus found her way through, when they saw the ice reforming behind her. They plunged into it, each man with a single hope in his heart.
Just through these miles. Just through this strait. There will be free water on the other side.
The ice did not surrender silently to them. Far from it. It whistled and whined and thundered; sometimes it sounded like animals baying, or like birds screeching. Sometimes it grumbled low, as if there were something under the waves, some sea monster, beating the underside of the ship. It was as if the ice were alive. It snaked and snapped and fell away from them, and as they pushed on from the front, it tugged at the stern, huge cold hands swatting the timber.

Okay, it ain’t Faulkner, but it’s a far cry better than what ice-jams the rest of the novel—Jo’s story which forms the core of the narrative. As the book opens, we see Jo grudgingly taking an assignment to interview maverick adventurer Doug Marshall, a tall, hairy fellow who’s on a harebrained mission in the arctic. Marshall is obsessed with the fate of Franklin and has spent most of his adult life trying to find the wreckage of the ships.

Eventually, Jo catches up to him, gets her interview and—this should come as no surprise to Victoria Holt fans—falls head over heels in love. Well, there are complications. Marshall’s married, for one thing. And, typically, it’s a sour, nearly-dissolved marriage to a shrew named Alicia (a character filled with such venomous vindictiveness that she approaches caricature). And then there’s Marshall’s temperamental 19-year-old son John who shares his father’s obsession for the lost arctic explorers—even though he’s all wound up in knots because, as a father, Doug has always been as cold and distant as Greenland.

Things happen—chains of eye-rolling/Puh-leeze tragic circumstances—which I won’t go into here for the sake of those one or two readers who bravely want to attempt The Ice Child and don’t wish to know all the spoilers beforehand. But, suffice to say, eventually Jo gives birth to Doug’s child. That boy is born with a rare blood disease and the only hope of saving him is a bone-marrow transplant. John is the closest and best match. But, get this, John is now lost in the arctic in his quest to find the remains of the Franklin party.

The Ice Child has such heated, soap-opera language that it eventually melts down to a puddle in your hands. Have some towels ready to mop up the mess, especially when you get dialogue like this between Jo and her doctor:

She sobbed. “John won’t be a match, he will never come back. Sam is going to die.â€?
“You mustn’t believe that,â€? he said.
“Don’t start telling me what to believe again!â€?
“I’m not,â€? he said. “I’m telling you that you must hold on.â€?
“I can’t,â€? she cried. “I can’t bear another day of watching him go from me. I can’t do it anymore.â€?

Puh-leeze. ( )