Title: Nine Perfect Strangers
Author: Liane Moriarty
Release Date: 18th September 2018
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Source: Proof copy from the publisher
Fourteen-year-old Jade Hameister had a dream: to complete the Polar Hat-Trick.
In 2016, she skied to the North Pole.
In 2017, she completed the Greenland Crossing.
In 2018, she arrived at the South Pole.
This is the story of an adventurer who never gave up - who set herself incredible challenges beyond her years and experience. An adventurer who endured extremes of cold and blizzards; tackled treacherous terrain where one wrong step could be fatal; struggled through sastrugi, ice rubble and emotional lows to achieve an extraordinary goal.
Along the way, she made a sandwich for online trolls, inspired young people, and made international headlines.
At sixteen, Jade Hameister became the youngest person in history to complete the Polar Hat-Trick.
I really wanted to love this book. It's the story of a young, female adventurer who has overcome a whole raft of adversities to go places no one has ever gone and prove there's more to girls than the media portrays. Jade is articulate in interviews and clearly has dreams and passions that she is unafraid to follow. She's brave, strong, and insanely motivated. She's had the chance to do things a lot of people her age can only dream of doing. And now she's written it all down in her debut memoir, My Polar Dream. The whole thing sounded exactly like my cup of tea.
Except it wasn't. I want to be careful here, because this is a girl I think a lot of people will really look up to and an example that definitely wasn't around when I was in my early teens. So I want it to be clear that this is not a personal attack, but merely a mediocre review for what could have been an amazing autobiography.
It is clear from the start that this was going to be a quick read: the writing is simplistic and there isn't any hidden meanings; what Jade wants to say, she'll say straight out. However, it was really the writing style that let the book down for me. I wanted more. The parts that I found most interesting - hiding in her tent from polar bears, living in close confines with her dad for weeks on end, being the only girl in an all-male group, why she picked this challenge before she even knew how to ski - were never explored in the depth that I felt they deserved. I came away feeling I knew more about her weightloss over the duration of the South Pole trek than I did about the harsh emotional challenges she faced (and overcame).
I think this is an important book for young girls, but I definitely feel that it should be more heavily targeted towards this audience. It's not a book I would recommend to someone my own age or older, instead it's a book girls in their early teens should be reading. Jade is an admirable young woman, but I was just too old to properly enjoy her writing.
