The Polar Bear Explorer’s Club by Alex Bell

Welcome to a world of enchanted penguins, yetis, starflakes, sleigh travel, and pet polar bears. It’s the perfect place to be an explorer. If you’re a boy, that is. If you’re a girl, it’s deportment and embroidery for you.

Snow orphan Stella Starflake Pearl makes short work of breaking the rules and by chapter three, she’s aboard a ship laden with wolves en route to the polar Icelands.

Calamity strikes on arrival and Stella becomes separated from the group. Luckily, she’s accompanied by three other junior explorers: the dashing wolf-whisperer Shay, Stella’s best-friend Beanie, and a sullen magician called Ethan.

And so begins an epic journey. The frozen landscape appears barren, yet lurking within the icy contours are strange creatures and stranger nightmares, and not everything is as it seems.

There are all sorts of literary allusions at play: Odysseus, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Frozen, Moby Dick, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White… And plenty of great one-liners. I particularly enjoyed Stella asking Ethan if entered the Club by slithering up the drain, and Shay calling Ethan an uppity prawn.

And Great Scott! The final scene is so deliciously dreadful, my children went screaming around the house for an hour pretending to be the undead... What will happen next?

The Polar Bear Explorer’s Club by Alex Bell was published in 2017 by Faber & Faber. The series continues with Explorers on Witch Mountain (2018) and concludes with Explorers on Black Ice Bridge (2019). The Faber editions feature show-stopping front covers by Croatian illustrator Tomislav Tomic.

*Note the Simon & Schuster editions of the series have different titles for books two and three: The Forbidden Expedition and Crossing the Black Ice Bridge respectively.

The Polar Bear Explorer’s Club is a middle-grade adventure odyssey for 8-12 years olds.

WHAT TO READ NEXT!

Brightstorm by Vashti Hardy - middle-grade steam punk adventure into new lands