All about me

I could appreciate the writing, but it seemed a bit disjointed to me. Certain passages were really moving, such as Bo talking to his father at the top of the rocky mountain and the story line involving the teacher who tended to the injured child. But there didn't seem to be enough holding it together for me. There comes a point when writing is too indirect and too obscure and verges on meaninglessness. For me this story veered dangerously close to that. I felt like the author should have worked at least as hard as she expected the reader to.
The things that kept me reading were the quality of individual passages (despite their disjointed feeling) and the fact that it was not a long novel. The book seemed to foreshadow questions, but never quite asked them. So when the answers were provided there was nothing much for them to hang on to. I was waiting for more exploration of the longer nights and days at the ends of the poles as the context for Isla's family dramas.
I thought for a while at the beginning of the book that I might really connect with it. I grew up in a harbourside suburb in Sydney at a time when it was a working harbour. The names of many of the ships are seared into my subconscious, so that when I read names of large ships they sounded familiar. I loved watching the boats and marvelled at the tug boats singlehandedly guiding enormous big ships through the nooks and crannies of Sydney Harbour.
So while I really enjoyed individual passages of the book, I didn't feel like it really held together as a coherent whole.