ABSTRACT
This chapter examines three contemporary novels aimed at a young adult audience that move from one example of realistic fiction: Marcus Sedgwick’s (2009) Revolver, via a work that uses specificities of place to envision alternative ways of life only incrementally removed from the plausible: Rebecca Stead’s (2007) First Light, to a text in which physical laws are radically reconfigured: Sarah Beth Durst’s (2009) Ice. The focus is on how the function of the Arctic varies with each work’s connections to the real world, and how aspects of the Arctic destabilize the characters’ possibilities for physical and existential orientation.
