Elizabeth Arthur

Young girl with lifetime fascination with Antarctica grows up as young scholar who abandons her dissertation to lead an expedition to recreate Robert Falcon Scott's 1910 fatal race to the South Pole. It takes 200 fascinating pages (out of 800) just to get there, but every page is worth the wait. Lyric, introspective, sometimes hilarious, richly detailed, its hard to believe this is a novel and not a memoir.

Binding Spell is another one of those stories where you feel like you have been lifted out of your little life and plopped down in the middle of someone else's. A lot of someone elses, really. Felicity, Indiana is a community full of interesting characters and Binding Spell has the occasional long rambling commentary on religion and the nuclear arms threat, especially when the Russians come to town. Let me back up. Meet the community of Felicity: Ryland Guthrie is a hypochondriac furniture show more salesman. His brother Peale has been the county sheriff for all of five months. Ryland was married to April (divorced five years) and they have a son, Clayton. Peale married Amanda but sometimes forgets she's his wife. Bailey and Howell Bourne are brother and sister. They lost their parents in a car accident. Bailey is twenty years old and a witch in training and Howell is married to Charlene. Ada Esterhaczy is Hungarian and a self proclaimed witch. Maggie, a counselor at Powell College, is her granddaughter. She also dabbles in witchcraft. Billy Bob Watson is the maintenance man at Powell. He likes to try to run over students with his tractor. Mitch Ketchum is a down and out desperate farmer in danger of losing his farm. Murrary Anderson artificially inseminates horses and has just been dumped by his girlfriend, Rosie. Dr. Richard Minot is a professor at Howell and has the hots for Maggie. Ryland starts dating Maggie. Peale has a thing for Bailey. Ada just wants her dog to mate with Ryland's so that she can breed puppies. Then there are is the weather. Did you get all of that? Now enter the two Russians, come to visit Powell College. Howell, Billy Bob and Mitch hatch a plan to kidnap the Russians in order to save their farms. Thinking Ada will hate the Russians due to her Hungarian heritage they bring the captives to her farm. Only Ada is too busy cooking up love potions to bind certain couples (human and animal)...and that's when things go a little crazy. show less

I feel like reading this book has been a long, long journey. It's not the kind of novel where the plot drags you along; the author takes every chance to branch off into musings about politics, religion, science, mythology, empire, etc. That said, I think that's the intention of the book - the plot is just a very light framework for all of these diversions.

It's beautifully written, and the sort of book that no doubt would well repay frequent rereading, dipping in a little at a time.

Some good description of the icy scenery and reactions to it, especially at the bodily level. But it doesn't really grip until things start to go wrong.Till that point, which is nearly the end of the book, it has a touch of "Five go to the Antarctic", i.e. everybody is too naïve and too nice. Ambitious, but falls short. Wrong word, it's far too long, an all too frequent fault, especially among US writers. The heroine doesn't even touch the Antarctic till page 300. And while the editor was show more cutting, they might have corrected some of the many minor errors, such as misspelling Huntley & Palmer biscuits and calling a Zen rishi Chinese. There's a lot of pseudo-philosophical physicsy stuff which gets in the way and I wonder how accurate that is, given that she seems not to know the difference between the 4th and 5th dimensions. Even the lyricists of "Hair" got that one right.
I did stay the course, nearly 800 pages, because I share the heroine's dream of going to the Antarctic in Scott's footsteps. show less