South Pole Station : a novel

Title:

Author:

Shelby, Ashley, 1977- author.

Personal Author:

Shelby, Ashley, 1977- author.

ISBN:

9781250112828

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

360 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Abstract:

"Do you have digestion problems due to stress? Do you have problems with authority? How many alcoholic drinks do you consume a week? Would you rather be a florist or a truck driver? These are the questions that decide who has what it takes to live at South Pole Station, a place with an average temperature of -54°F and no sunlight for six months a year. Cooper Gosling is adrift at thirty, unmoored by a family tragedy and floundering in her career as a painter. So she applies to the National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Program and flees to Antarctica -- the bottom of the Earth -- where she encounters a group of misfits motivated by desires as ambiguous as her own. There's Pearl, the cook whose Carrot Mushroom Loaf becomes means toward her Machiavellian ambitions; the oxymoronic Sal (he is an attractive astrophysicist); and Tucker, the only gay black man on the continent who, as station manager, casts a watchful eye on all. The only thing they have in common is the conviction that they don't belong anywhere else. Enter Frank Pavano -- a climatologist with unorthodox beliefs. His presence will rattle this already unbalanced community, bringing Cooper and the Polies to the center of a global controversy and threatening the 800-million-year-old ice chip they call home. In the tradition of And Then We Came to the End and Where'd You Go Bernadette?, South Pole Station is a warmhearted comedy of errors set in the world's harshest place."-- Provided by publisher.

Subject Term:

Belonging (Social psychology) -- Fiction.

Eccentrics and eccentricities -- Fiction.

Escape (Psychology) -- Fiction.

Global warming -- Fiction.

Geographic Term:

Antarctica -- Fiction.

South Pole -- Fiction.

Genre:

Humorous fiction.

Psychological fiction.

Summary:

Holds:

Available:*

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Summary

Do you have digestion problems due to stress? Do you have problems with authority? How many alcoholic drinks do you consume a week? Would you rather be a florist or a truck driver? These are the questions that decide who has what it takes to live at South Pole Station, a place with an average temperature of -54°F and no sunlight for six months a year. Cooper Gosling has just answered five hundred of them. Her results indicate she is strange enough for Polar life. Cooper's not sure if this is an achievement, but she knows she has nothing to lose. Unmoored by a recent family tragedy, she's adrift at thirty and--despite her early promise as a painter--on the verge of sinking her career. So she accepts her place in the National Science Foundation's Artists & Writers Program and flees to Antarctica--where she encounters a group of misfits motivated by desires as ambiguous as her own.A winning comedy of errors set in the world's harshest place, Ashley Shelby's South Pole Station is a wry and witty debut novel about the courage it takes to come together, even as everything around you falls apart.* For readers of dysfunctional family dramas such as Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's The Nest (but in Antarctica, with beards)

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

In the messy human petri dish at the South Pole, a comic novel brews.Shelby begins her smart and inventive first novel with 11 italicized questions plucked from a psychiatric evaluation: "Are you often sad? Do you have digestion problems due to stress? Do you have problems with authority?..."Any American headed to Antarctica in 2003 via the National Science Foundation must answer them. It's a nifty way to unpack character and signal why her heroine, Cooper Gosling, has passed only provisionally. Cooper is 30, a drinker and a fine arts painter from the upper Midwest, a smartass who holds that "hotdish had never received its gastronomic due and the fake Minnesota accents in Fargo were the blackface of regional phonology." Fetching and witty, Cooper becomes the station chief's favorite and irresistible to a tall and handsome astrophysicist. Their attractionone of the novel's key pleasuresis telegraphed within the first few pages. Readers also learn early that Cooper is fleeing the sorrow of her twin's recent suicide; she carries a pinch of his ashes in a travel-size Tylenol bottle. Thus, Shelby balances Eros with Thanatos in a story composed of barbed dialogue, email, and official memos. A climate-change skeptic arrives to bedevil the polar community, hatching a far-fetched political conspiracy. Clearly, the writer likes agitapolitics mixed with science fuels Red River Rising (2004), her nonfiction book about the catastrophic 1997 flood in Grand Forks, North Dakota. She writes well about science and the peculiar, pressurized human ecosystem at the bottom of the world. Bozer, a polar station construction chief, gets his own point-of-view chapter, and it lifts him from caricature to one of the best aspects of the book. Hovering over all is Cooper's sort-of "spirit animal," the British explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who wrote the Antarctica classic The Worst Journey in the World. This new book would no doubt confound him but, in the end, bring him delight. Jokes lubricate a moving and occasionally preposterous story of love and death in the Antarctic cold. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.