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A review by billie_budd
All the White Spaces by Ally Wilkes
adventurous
dark
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
3.5
I really, really wanted to love this book—on paper it has all the elements I want in a book right now, all at once (polar exploration, interwar period, trans protagonist). And others who are interested in some combination of those elements would probably find this well worth the read! But there was a lot that didn’t quite come together for me.
There’s about 50-75 pages in the middle where everything felt disjointed (in what I can only read as an unintentional way); quotidian things were happening but I could barely tell what they were, or if they were important, because they were interspersed so heavily with flashbacks and memories. Past that part there’s less of this muddled feeling, but it was a struggle to get past the middle of the book.
I also really missed relationships in this book, especially because there’s so much down-time plot-wise, on the ship, on the ice. But I didn’t feel that really any relationships between any characters were developed in any real way, even though they all spent so much time in exceedingly close quarters and enduring events that could have changed or strengthened their relationships in really significant ways, and several of them knew each other pre-plot. (An exception to this is the Randall/Clarke dynamic, which I felt was complex and genuine and changed compellingly over time.) I was frustrated by how much of the time I really wanted to be reading a conversation and instead was just watching someone hammer in some nail, lost in thought.
Some of the horror elements were genuinely spooky but I did feel that they could have been carried off better if the tension in the book as a whole had been carried better instead of feeling as flat as it did, and weighed down by various chores and memories—if the protagonist had ever felt present enough in his surroundings to show that tension.
All that said, I found the narrative of the protagonist’s transness and struggles with family transphobia very well done, and very well integrated with the plot’s main conflicts. This was a great read just to get to hang out with him (and in high-adventure places and scenarios typically considered all-cis-male-only, no less), even if by the end I wished I had been given a view of him and his expedition comrades that was somehow more personal.
There’s about 50-75 pages in the middle where everything felt disjointed (in what I can only read as an unintentional way); quotidian things were happening but I could barely tell what they were, or if they were important, because they were interspersed so heavily with flashbacks and memories. Past that part there’s less of this muddled feeling, but it was a struggle to get past the middle of the book.
I also really missed relationships in this book, especially because there’s so much down-time plot-wise, on the ship, on the ice. But I didn’t feel that really any relationships between any characters were developed in any real way, even though they all spent so much time in exceedingly close quarters and enduring events that could have changed or strengthened their relationships in really significant ways, and several of them knew each other pre-plot. (An exception to this is the Randall/Clarke dynamic, which I felt was complex and genuine and changed compellingly over time.) I was frustrated by how much of the time I really wanted to be reading a conversation and instead was just watching someone hammer in some nail, lost in thought.
Some of the horror elements were genuinely spooky but I did feel that they could have been carried off better if the tension in the book as a whole had been carried better instead of feeling as flat as it did, and weighed down by various chores and memories—if the protagonist had ever felt present enough in his surroundings to show that tension.
All that said, I found the narrative of the protagonist’s transness and struggles with family transphobia very well done, and very well integrated with the plot’s main conflicts. This was a great read just to get to hang out with him (and in high-adventure places and scenarios typically considered all-cis-male-only, no less), even if by the end I wished I had been given a view of him and his expedition comrades that was somehow more personal.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Homophobia, Suicide, Transphobia, and Dysphoria