‘Captain Oates, hero of the Antarctic, has been dead for nearly a century. But not in Sym’s head …’

Sym is a retard. She hasn’t snogged anyone and has a hearing aid that makes all the other girls think she’s socially rejected.

This is a good book: if you are grading it on the description and how realistic the book is it would definitely get 10/10. But sadly, for the author, it’s not. It is a book that doesn’t make you want to turn over the pages, but it has a good story that takes a while to get to.

The book is about a fourteen-year-old girl who has recently coped with the death of her father (who never really liked her anyway). When this happens, she imagines Titus Oates as her boyfriend: an old hero of the Antarctic who died looking for something called Symmes Hole. She doesn’t know that he was looking for that though.

When her uncle suddenly comes up with the idea that they should go to Paris (Sym and her mother), things seem a little suspicious because it right in the middle of her exam week. When her uncle, Victor, hides Sym’s mother’s passport and takes Sym to the Antarctic on a completely different expedition, I thought that Victor was a perverted psycho. I was wrong.

Victor turns out to be a dedicated explorer looking for something valuable in the Antarctic. Things start to unravel as Sym finds out that people on this expedition are all dedicated workers (like her uncle) for one thing: Symmes Hole!

I’d say this was a book more for adults than children. I would give this 6/10 because it is a very descriptive book that really puts you in the shoes of the main character. It also had a good story but I feel it took to long to get to the point.