Minds of Winter

Well that was gigantically disappointing. 
There were hints of a story I wanted to read: a mysterious, possibly cursed object with a long history of doomed adventure, investigated in the present day by a pair with their own secrets/possible dark pasts, the promise of answers to both historical and contemporary mysteries, maybe even magical realism/ghost stories in the possibility of appearing and disappearing land and people in the far North, which even today seems foreboding despite being no longer a place unmapped/unexplored.

 Unfortunately the present day framework was a collection of bare snippets with seemingly needless drag out of distrustful banal reveals between two strangers. The looks back in the past too often dragged on - trying to each be their own story in adding to the MacGuffin's mystique. It made it hard to care about any set of characters when you know you're just passing them by and looking for the clue buried inside the anecdote.

 I'm not a polar exploration historian so I have no context for how much the author completely made up or just reported verbatim from history, so it kind of loses its liveliness if one's left to wonder if this is mostly torn from a textbook. There are any number of melodramatic conversations which obviously the author would have had to extrapolate, but as interludes between men obsessed with exploration and ambition and the women left behind, they all start to blur together. 

The link from the modern woman to the grandfather was the most intriguing, but we didn't get near enough of it. 

The book seems to mourn the loss of an age of exploration, of mystery, to the extent that it tried to both leave the mystery unsolved and give the most baffling, unsatisfactory answer to it at the same time. In modern times looking back, exploration is  associated with conquest, invasion and resource stripping, I'm afraid there was no romance left to recapture, and the more fantastical fiction floated was too fragmented to enjoy as an alternative.