Book review

Book review from The Movie Snob

The Solitude of Thomas Cave, by Georgina Harding (Bloomsbury 2007). Well, this will teach me not to buy a book simply because Entertainment Weekly magazine gives it an "A" -- even if it if also "EW's Pick" of the week. The premise was interesting. In the early 1600's, a whaling ship is going about its business off the coast of northern Greenland. Summer is coming to an end, and soon the ship will head home for the winter. One sailor tells a story he had heard of a man who was stranded and stayed in that harsh wilderness all winter long and was still alive when the whalers returned the next summer. No one believes it is possible, except one man, Thomas Cave. A wager is made, and the ship leaves him there with plenty of supplies. And most of the rest of the book is his story of survival, and his grappling with an unspoken sorrow from the past through the long, dark winter. It was an okay story, but I didn't particularly buy the author's attempt to make her writing and the dialogue sound like the early 17th century. And I didn't care for the epilogue. Mediocre.