Book Review: Latitudes of Melt by Joan Clark
November18
Ice plays a major role in Joan Clark’s novel Latitudes of Melt,
Ice delivers Aurora from the frigid North Atlantic to her new family in Newfoundland. Ice becomes her son Stan’s career. The huge icebergs that break off the earth’s polar regions and float off the shore of Newfoundland sink ships but are beautiful to swim around. Ice gives the book its title, referring to the latitudes at which icebergs melt.
“Because Newfoundland was roughly between 46 and 51 degrees north, it was smack in the middle of the latitudes of melt.”
I’ve never read anything by Louis L’Amour who is one of the most prolific writers I’ve run into, and seems to be “THE” name in Western fiction. My dad used to read a lot of books by L’Amour. He’s been gone eleven years so I thought it was about time I investigated those books that were always around the house when I was growing up. 
is set in the outport villages of Paradise Deep and The Gut, joined by the Tolt Road over the headland between them, in an undefined period that covers most of the nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth. The novel chronicles the lives of two rival families (the Sellers and the Devines) for six generations, and I often referred to the genealogy chart at the front of the book, especially during my first reading.
Since his city friends thought