Spire was so in-your-face feminist, I had a hard time shutting down the part of my brain that kept yelling "why are you letting this book shove all these politics down your throat?" I simply wanted a nice bio-adventure/thriller set in a remote science station. (I'm a scientist, and I simply wanted some escapist fun) The fact that the main character is a brilliant FEMALE scientist was great and should have been relatable, but not a fact worth emphasizing over and over and OVER again. Woman against the world, okay, we get it. Men are privileged, women are underappreciated, we get it. But please, keep hitting us over the head with this one message, instead of giving us realistic characters we can cheer for and men who aren't total cliches.

Definitely a page-turner! SPIRE has an interesting premise, a main character that I really liked, and enough suspense to keep me thinking about it even when I had to put the book down to do other things.

The storyline of this book intrigued me and it is a great read. I backed Caroline through the book and empathised with her through all her trials. I went onto the internet to see if SPIRE was real as the story was so good. The detail given was so in depth that I expected some of it to be from fact. I don’t want to give the story away but I thought the first discovery would solve the problem. This was extremely well written in my opinion and was so different from the books that I normally read I got through it really quickly and recommended to some of my bookworm friends.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get to this before the expiration date. I would be happy to give a review if I can get an e-copy.

Dr. Caroline Burchell goes to Antartica with virus' mutated and deadly. Soon after her arrival people at the outpost start dying from the virus' that supposedly only she has access to. Interspersed with highly amusing Skype chats with her teenage daughter and outside friends it was an entertaining read. I had not read the first book but this one stands alone.

Spire by Fiona Snyckers is a recommended thriller set in Antarctica.

Dr. Caroline Burchell is a surgeon and virologist who has been chosen to join the team of SPIRE and spend the winter in Antarctica doing research. SPIRE stands for the South Pole International Research Establishment. Caroline has brought vials of cryogenically frozen viruses that she plans to study over the 8-9 months she will be there. Before she can even begin her research though, the whole team there is coming down with a wide ranging number of diseases that are represented in her vials. The only problem is that the seals on her vials are all still intact which means someone else has brought the same deadly diseases to the station and released them. Soon Caroline is the only survivor with no hope of rescue in sight; however soon mysterious occurrences in the station make her suspect that there may be another survivor hiding from her.

The set up to Spire is intriguing as I am always up for virus-outbreak stories. Then it changed into potentially an exciting lone-woman-against-the-elements story. For a brief, shining moment I thought it was going to be sort of a twist on The Martian, or Endurance, only with a female doctor trapped at an Antarctica research station, but it soon lost some of its initial momentum and morphed into something else. The quality of the writing is adequate, no glaring problems and written in a simple, easy to follow style reminiscent of a YA novel.

Once the story changed, it lost its energy. The viruses were introduced to eliminate everyone and add a twist that was, quite frankly, not very believable. Add to this Caroline's finding a cat at the station, and her ability to use the internet, contact people, including colleagues and her family, Skype, etc., made the disorienting sense of isolation and solitude vanish. The horrible sense of isolation and potential for death, etc., was really only fully utilized during one part of the plot. FYI, it's also not a very tech-savvy novel for those of you who care about such things.

Now, it is still an interesting story. It was easy to set all my misgivings aside and just enjoy the novel as is. Don't expect any great use of the viruses, though, beyond a plot element to isolate Caroline. This is an airplane book. It will hold your attention and help pass the time but you won't worry if you never finish it. Apparently it is a sequel to the novel Now Following You, but you won't need to read that before Spire.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Clockwork Books.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2017/07/spire.html
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2069362510

Exciting, page-turning mystery. Spending the winter in Antarctica would be my worst nightmare. It quickly became that for our protagonist. Cold was one of the least of her problems. The storyline made me think it could have been written by Michael Crichton.

SPIRE by Fiona Snyckers is without a doubt the worst book I have read this year. I hear Homer Simpson in the back of my head saying “so far” but I think this one has the legs to take on any contenders.

The main character, Dr Caroline Mary-Sue, is a surgeon/virologist/genius who goes to Antarctica to work at the ridiculously named South Pole International Research Establishment. She is separated from her know-it-all daughter and her co-habitant male companion, but fortunately they are only a quick skype call away.

Shortly after she arrives, people start falling sick, with a diverse array of infectious diseases to which our erstwhile hero is conveniently all immune. She is left, seemingly alone, in a facility filled with dead bodies, and is forced to survive because the research foundation is a bunch of uncaring arseholes who think she is the murderer and don’t want to send a rescue for her.

Naturally she insists that she is innocent, and must set about working through back channels to survive, and uncover the real culprit behind the murders of her colleagues. Everyone from the establishment to INTERPOL seems prepared to let her just starve, freeze and die in the next 8-9 months.

That’s the premise out of the way, let’s talk about the politics of this book.

In the opening pages there is a discussion of “light skin privilege”, and this trend of feminist ideology continues throughout the novel. I don’t think this book could have been any more feminist if it tried, with a brilliant, misunderstood woman fighting against an uncaring patriarchy, and its legion of incompetent predominantly male minions. This hits all the hot button topics from Islamophobia and racial profiling, to general dismissal of our heroine’s brilliance. Fortunately, there are also a few allies to help her along the way.

This book is trying way too hard to be a sort of Flashdance/Alien crossover, and its premise of one girl against the world quickly grows old. Dr Mary-Sue is an unsympathetic know it all who can basically do everything. There were times when she was called on to do some scientific mumbo-jumbo – which I didn’t really understand, but thought it would have been outside of her field of expertise - that was just sort of handwaved.

Okay, her name isn't really Dr Mary-Sue.

Despite being stuck in Antarctica, she also seems to have extremely convenient constant access to the internet, although she mostly uses it for skyping and … WebMD (basically). I live in a major city and my internet isn’t that great, yet this seems to be no barrier to her.

The “bad guy” is basically an autistic guy who sits in a closet and watches her on closed circuit television. I say “bad guy” for lack of a better term, since everyone in the entire world besides her immediate family, and a few close internet friends, are basically servants of the patriarchy and are therefore “bad guys”. At one point Dr Mary-Sue says that at least her academic colleagues recognise the brilliance of her research while the establishment are just prepared to let her die in a freezing hell. Very eye roll worthy.

This is what happens when authors try to write techno-thrillers full of empowering feminist messages. It’s tedious, it feels incredibly inauthentic, and a lot of the action and events feel entirely cartoonish.

The only reason I stuck with the book – apart from my own masochism – was to see how badly it would all end, and needless to say the author didn’t let me down. This was an awful read from the first page to the last, and lacks any kind of momentum. Whatever pitfalls the main character encounters you already know are going to be overcome through some deus ex machina, or klutzy awesomeness.

The blurb of the book sounded interesting enough, which is why I picked it up in the first place. And if the author had taken that promise and run with it, developed proper freaking tension, and given the main character some legitimate challenges to overcome, and not just insta-win buttons for everything, this might have been a readable book.

At least it was short.

The Spire has many elements that make for a good vacation book for me. I enjoyed the setting (Antartica) and the resourcefulness of the main character. Fiona did a great job of adding enough technical details to increase the validity of the story without any drag on the plot - nicely researched. I would definitely read more by this author.

Excellent read. Kept me awake into the night, could not put it down. I liked the main character. Unique premise. A good book for me is one where I can picture the plot in my mind, this one did just that. Felt like I was watching a movie.

Dr. Caroline Burchell is on the assignment of a lifetime. A talented surgeon and virologist, Caroline has been accepted as a “winter-over” scientist in SPIRE, a remote research station in Antarctica. Her subject of research – a container of cryogenically frozen viruses – has been brought to Antarctica under heavy guard, and is kept under highly secure lock and key. Which doesn’t explain why her fellow researchers and residents are coming down with the bubonic plague, ebola, and SARS…

As the Antarctic winter gets under way, Caroline has the odds stacked against her. There’s the unexplained outbreak, a station that requires life-risking maintenance and repair, and the mounting suspicion from her superiors in New York that she herself is the cause of the outbreak. An excellent mix of science and suspense, Spire will have you turning the page in anticipation and terror as you root for Caroline to make it through and find out who, exactly, released those viruses in the first place.

SPIRE by Fiona Snyckers. I've been trying to find the words to do justice to describing the book. I can't seem to get past WOW and amazing. I could not put the book down until it was finished. Loved Caroline and Charka and the whole story line. Highly recommended.

Thank you to the publisher, author, and NetGalley for the opportunity to preview the book.

SPIRE - South Pole International Research Establishment

I really enjoy reading books about extremely cold locations so of course anything based on Antarctica is going to be on my radar.

This is one of the best fiction books I've read about this dangerous, inhospitable environment.

Dr. Caroline Burchell from Johannesburg, South Africa, has been chosen to be the resident surgeon at the SPIRE base and to winter-over at the SPIRE base. She is also a virologist and plans on testing the incubation period of viruses in isolated communities (and what is more isolated than Antarctica in the winter).

What she doesn't expect is for her fellow residents at the base to start getting extremely ill from exotic viruses - viruses that only Caroline has access to.

I loved Caroline's character - a very strong woman placed in impossible circumstances.

The story was fast-paced and full of action and "oh s**t" moments. I loved the whole story from beginning to end.

I received this book from Clockwork Books through Net Galley in exchange for my unbiased review.

This book downloaded instead of the one I clicked on. It must have been a Netgalley glitch

Review of THE SPIRE by Fiona Snyckers

THE SPIRE is a fascinating novel about one of my favourite topics, Antarctica, and about terrifying eco-terrorism. Terrifying from the point of view of the human race, this extremist form targets the human species in toto. Dr. Caroline Burchell is a surgeon and virologist accepted for winterover in Antarctica at the South Pole Research Station. She intends to study certain dangerous viruses in extreme cold. What she couldn't expect is an outbreak, not involving the viruses she brought in, that wipes out the personnel of SPIRE. She also couldn't plan on being adjudged a mass murderer. What follows is immediately and continuously riveting. Caroline is an immensely strong female protagonist and eliciting readers' empathy (if not that of the eco-terrorist!)

4 and 1 / 2 stars

Dr. Caroline Burchell and her nurse Kelebile Chuma have a major crisis on their hands. Wintering over in the Antarctic they have an outbreak of serious and deadly diseases that have not been seen for centuries. People start dying. Caroline sends out a message to the rest of the base for volunteers to help in sick bay. No one answers. She does a quick survey of the station and finds many dead and a few survivors. These she sends to sick bay.

Then Kelebile falls ill and Caroline is alone with her many patients. Then worse news occurs. Caroline herself falls ill.

This is the remarkable story of one woman’s grit and determination to survive in a hostile and deadly environment. After recovering from her illness, she meticulously plans her day. She finds a friend. She finds an enemy. She learns that she is not alone as long as Skype keeps working. She receives messages on the sly from a friend outside the pod.

This is an extremely well written and plotted book. There were a couple of weak points, but they did not detract from the story at all. There were a couple of points that I wanted explained a little better. The book is both suspenseful and exciting. I truly enjoyed reading it.

I want to thank Netgalley and Clockwork Books/IBPA Members’ Titles for forwarding to me a copy of this great book to read.

Disease specialists keep samples of deadly viruses in the event they need o develop a vaccine, but what happens when something goes wrong at one the facilities that stores the viruses. SPIRE is a brand new state of the art research facility in Antarctica under heavy guard. Within days of its inception people begin dying terrible deaths from diseases long believed wiped from the face of the earth. Virologist Caroline Burchett is on site trying to find out what happened when a huge storm hits, leaving her stranded and alone. Or is she? There’s something about mysteries set in Antarctica, the remoteness, the killer climate, that ups the creep factor. This was tons of fun