New book reviews span middle-grade fun, Arctic change and myth
Verdict: A fast, funny middle-grade adventure that pairs comic chaos with a positive message about becoming your own kind of good.
At the edge of a changing world
Frostlines: A Journey Through Entangled Lives and Landscapes in a Warming Arctic, by Neil Shea (ISBN 9780063138575, Ecco, $28 hardcover, 240 pages)
National Geographic writer Neil Shea offers a boots-on-the-ground portrait of the Arctic at a moment of profound and unsettling transformation. Blending natural history, anthropology and immersive travel writing, Shea brings readers into a region often discussed in abstractions and data points – and gives it human and animal faces.
Shea’s journeys span the circumpolar north, tracking dwindling caribou herds across North America, traveling with Indigenous hunters in Alaska and Nunavut, and observing wolves on Canada’s remote Ellesmere Island.
Along the way, he listens closely to Iñupiaq elders whose knowledge is rooted in generations of survival, to scientists documenting rapid environmental shifts, and to the land itself, where warming temperatures are rewriting ancient rhythms.
The Arctic he depicts is a mosaic of cultures, species, histories and geopolitical tensions, including the quiet emergence of a new Cold War along its borders.
What sets Frostlines apart is Shea’s ability to translate climate science into lived experience without sacrificing complexity. As Parade notes, the book “brings a human story to the science of climate change,” making its stakes feel immediate and personal.
Verdict: A beautifully written, deeply reported work that illuminates the Arctic not as a distant warning sign, but as a living world — changing fast and demanding our attention now.
A mythic voyage across power, survival and the sea
The Wayfinder, by Adam Johnson (ISBN 9780374619572, Berkley, $30 hardcover, 736 pages)
Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Adam Johnson’s newest work is an epic that feels at once ancient and strikingly contemporary. Drawing on South Pacific myth, oral history and political allegory, Johnson creates a world so vivid it seems less invented than revealed.
