** South Pole Station by Ashley Shelby

South Pole Station has everything a great novel may want: an exotic venue in a hostile environment, a cast of misfits, and plenty of political intrigue, both local and global. And yet it never came together for me. Not that I did not enjoy the absurdity of the selection and training process (chillingly conducted by a military contractor), the war between the old cook and the new cook in which cookbooks mysteriously disappear, or the solidarity between national bases once the US base runs afoul of its budget and politics — but the heroine’s back story, whether her family’s attachment to explorers’ stories or her brother’s suicide, seemed forced and irrelevant rather than providing a unifying theme.