MELT By Ele Fountain

Published by Pushkin

In this engaging, informative young adult novel, Yutu is growing up in a small town inside the Arctic circle where things are changing fast. He wants to hunt and also to go to university. Will he and his grandmother lose their home soon?

Bea, in yet another school in a large city is bullied but likes small aircraft jaunts with her geologist father, although he isn’t quite what he seems. Gradually and inevitably the two stories hurtle towards each other.

It is, of course, bitterly cold and dangerous. There’s crime in the mix too. I liked very much the synching of two first person narratives so that, in the end, you’re seeing the same thing from two different perspectives.

Yutu’s wise grandmother/ guardian is a splendid character steeped in the old ways and very capable, but also aware that another world is beckoning to Yutu and that’s fine.

I learned a lot about the Arctic, a wilderness threatened by both the oil industry and climate change. Ele Fountain is good at evoking a place few of us have experienced. And in the end, we have two teenagers with a lot in common and a constructive lasting friendship ahead.