Written in short bursts, like dispatches from the Arctic, Brother in Ice takes readers on an unlikely journey ... The lack of a traditional plot is buoyed by the book’s startling pace, which makes for a fresh and invigorating read.
[A] curious book, a composite of capsule history, essays and fictionalized memoir... Brother in Ice is something like a scrapbook of the years she devoted to researching these explorers and the mythology around them.
The novel – if that’s what we can call it – integrates these preoccupations, but contextualises them ... Kopf frequently juxtaposes science with the metaphysical, or with quotidian banality... A writer, she shows us, is a kind of polar explorer: both are driven by an obsession with abstraction; both are 'seeking out something in an unstable space'.
