From Publishers Weekly
The beauty of Niven's tale (after The Ice Master) reveals itself slowly, in hard-to-find bits and pieces, mirroring the piecemeal dawning of dread that blanketed the book's five protagonists one winter in 1923 on a bleak Arctic island. The explorers four young white men from the U.S. and Canada and Ada, a 23-year-old Inuit woman set out under a Canadian flag to claim a barren rock in the tundra north of the new Soviet Union for the British Empire. But with a lack of proper funding; a grandstanding, do-nothing Svengali of a leader; and an inexperienced crew, the mission was doomed from the start. Niven's hero is the slight, shy Blackjack, who, though neither as worldly wise as her companions nor as self-sufficient, learns to take care of herself and a dying member of her party after the team is trapped by ice for almost two years and the three others decide to cross the frozen ocean and make for Siberia, never to be seen again. By trapping foxes, hunting seals and dodging polar bears, Blackjack fights for her life and for the future of her ailing son, whom she left back home in Alaska, and for whose health-care expenses she agreed to take the trip. When she returns home as the only survivor, the ignoble jockeying for her attention and money by the press, her rescuer and the disreputable mission chief (who sat out the trip) melds with the clamor of city life (in Seattle and San Francisco), leaving both the reader and Blackjack near-nostalgic for the creaking ice floes and the slow rhythms of life in the northern frozen wastelands. Photos not seen by PW.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* Niven's first book, The Ice Master (2000), was a thrilling chronicle of an Arctic exploration mission gone horribly awry. In many ways, Ada Blackjack is a follow-up, as several of the same characters and problems recur. Vilhjalmur Steffanson, the scientist whose carelessness was largely responsible for the ill-fated voyage of the Karluk, once again embarks on a haphazard mission. This time, his aim is to send a colonizing party to frozen Wrangel Island, intending to claim it for Canada. Four eager young men volunteer for the trip and try to hire Eskimos to hunt, sew, and cook for them, but only one signs up: 23-year-old Ada Blackjack. The group manages to survive on Wrangel for a year, but then an expected supply ship fails to reach them, and their situation quickly becomes dire. Three of the men set off for Siberia to get help, leaving an ailing colleague and Ada to fend for themselves. Using the diaries of the men and Ada, Niven vividly re-creates the frozen land, the struggles of the group, and Ada's ups and downs after her return. This exhilarating account is essential reading for adventure-story fans. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Boston Globe
"Compellingly researched and told with novelistic flair . . . as brilliant and multifaceted as sunlight on new snow."


Chicago Sun-Times
"Niven convincingly shows that Blackjack is every inch a folk hero -- an engrossing fireside yarn."


Booklist
"This exhilarating account is essential reading for adventure-story fans."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

When twenty-three-year-old Inuit Ada Blackjack signed on as a seamstress for a top-secret Arctic expedition, her goal was simple: to earn money in order to provide for her young son. She and four men set out into the far North together in September 1921, but as winter set in, the expedition was beset by hardship, starvation, and tragedy. When Ada found her way back to civilization two years later, she was the expedition's sole survivor.

Ada Blackjack's gripping tale of her survival in the wild, and of the chaos and upheaval that attended her return to the world, comprises one of the most amazing untold adventures of the twentieth century. Drawing on Ada's never-before-seen diaries, bestselling author Jennifer Niven brings to vivid life the true story of a woman whose courage and determination defied society's expectations and made her an unlikely-and until now, unheralded-hero.

FROM THE CRITICS

Donna Marchetti - Cleveland Plain Dealer

A woman who deserved a place in history.

The Washington Post

Niven convincingly shows that Blackjack is every inch a folk hero, and the book succeeds as a sure-footed novelization of her forgotten story, spiked with occasional references to original sources -- including her diary -- that Niven recovered. An extensive fifth section of the book takes on another project: how Blackjack's story played. As Niven makes her way through the fog of bad press -- at one point a New York paper accused Blackjack of murder -- she becomes less narrator than critic, and Ada Blackjack evolves from an engrossing fireside yarn to an equally engrossing parsing of legal and media machinations. — Brad Wieners

Washington Post Book World

Niven convincingly shows Blackjack is every inch a hero, the book succeeds as a sure-footed novelization of her forgotten story.

Library Journal

A solid and suspenseful tale around the framework of records and diaries to reveal an obscure woman￯﾿ﾽs accidental heroism.

Publishers Weekly