Across Frozen Seas

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

High adventure, terrifying danger, close friendship, family troubles
faced and resolved, and a dash of the mystical or supernatural: this
novel for teens has it all.

John Wilson’s third young-adult book neatly blends the epic drama of
the fated Franklin Expedition of 1845 with the life and dreams of Dave
Young, a small-town boy living in Humboldt, Saskatchewan. Dave’s
grandfather Jim, who lives on a nearby farm, has often told Dave of an
ancestor who lost his life in a rescue party that failed to find the
Franklin Expedition. Dave feels drawn to the North and hopes to travel
there. A series of dreams takes him first to a Dickensian London, where
he and a friend sign on as cabin boys on the HMS Erebus and travel with
Franklin’s party.

To Dave, the dreams are instructive: “They are telling me things I
couldn’t possibly have known. Something strange is happening.”
Details of Dave’s life near a Hutterite community during a fierce
Saskatchewan winter are cleverly interwoven with the danger and
excitement faced by Franklin’s men. In the end, the hero of this
finely written coming-of-age tale finds himself altered by a near-death
experience: “I don’t know what my own life will bring but I know now
I will be able to handle it somehow.” Recommended.