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 nothing but embroidery for you.

Luckily, 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 quickly strikes and Stella becomes separated from her group, but in doing so meets three other junior explorers: the dashing wolf-whisperer Shay, Beanie, and a sullen magician called Ethan.

And so begins an epic journey through the frozen landscape. It 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 is the first in Alex Bell’s middle grade Explorer’s series.

WHAT TO READ NEXT

Explorers on Witch Mountain by Alex Bell

Brightstorm by Vashti Hardy