SOURCE: “Navigating a Sea of Adventure: Author Uses Contemporary Voice to Relate Novel's Tale of Arctic Explorers,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 7, 1998, p. E3.

In the following review, Martelle explores the major thematic concerns of Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal.

As a child growing up on Massachusetts' Cape Cod, Andrea Barrett was mesmerized by the memoirs of 19th century arctic explorers, with their tales of adventurous sea voyages through ice-choked passages, disastrous shipwrecks and “wintering over” on the killing ice pack.

Time slowly eroded the details of those stories from her memory, though, as Barrett grew up and stepped into adult life. College. Marriage. Dislocation from Cape Cod to western Massachusetts then to Rochester, N.Y., where she slipped into daily clouds of solitude to focus on her own writing, her own tales of personal, rather than polar, exploration.

Yet it was fiction...