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From Amazon
Joan Clark's Latitudes of Melt is a brash, ambitious, romantic novel, beginning in the wilds of Newfoundland's Southern Shore and extending to England, Ireland, and New York, stretching in time from the wreck of the Titanic in 1912 to the exploration of the wreck in the 1990s. The nexus of the story is Aurora Mulloy, a foundling discovered floating in the North Atlantic tied into a makeshift cradle left on an ice pan. The St. Croix family, fishers and salvagers from the hamlet of the Drook, raises Aurora. A free-spirited beauty with a shocking head of white hair, she eventually marries Tom Mulloy, a charming, literate lighthouse keeper, and they raise two children who are drawn out of the Drook and into the guts of the 20th century in search of love, life, and their origins. Latitudes of Melt is sometimes overwrought; the young Aurora often comes across as a kitschy, elfin wild woman, and the Titanic itself has already become an immense icon of sentimentality. The book succeeds in spite of these tendencies, because Clark, the author of Eiriksdottir and Governor General's Award nominee The Victory of Geraldine Gull, is an extraordinarily fine writer of unostentatious, effortless prose and a strong enough stylist to make her more cloying symbols disappear under the weight of a fine, well-told story. --Jack Illingworth
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