I went into Endurance with fairly high expectations. I’d seen good reviews on a few websites, so I figured it would be a good book to choose for my summer assignment. When I first started reading the book, I let go of some of those expectations, as it started off somewhat slow and failed to grab my attention. I didn’t want to give up on the book, though, because I experienced something similar when I read read the beginning of To Kill a Mockingbird. I didn’t think I was going to end up liking that book, but as the story progressed, I really liked it. Maybe this book would be like that, too.

I don’t want to say that Endurance was a complete disappointment, because it wasn’t, but it isn’t a book I would recommend to all of my friends, either. After the book was done explaining the situation of the Endurance’s crew, which personally, I think it spent a bit too long describing, it did get better. The book has a tendency, though, to do just what it did in the beginning, and spend too much time describing all of the details. I’m sure some people will appreciate the attention this book gave to the details, and evidently people do, based on the reviews I saw before I started reading Endurance. The details just seemed to lengthen the uneventful parts of the book, where the crew is stuck at one camp for a long time, which seems to be for large parts of the book. While they’re at the camps, they do small things that contribute to their survival, but none of it seems significant, nor is it very interesting to read about. The part of this that I enjoyed quite a bit was the diaries of the crew, seeing how different people react differently and think differently about the dire situation that they’re all in. I don’t think this makes up for how uneventful the book was, though.

I also have other things to say about this book, other than a lengthy list of complaints. I really enjoyed the end of the book, around the time that Shackleton left most of his crew in an attempt to reach land and get a rescue for them. The uncertainty of the situation made me want to know when they would make it to land, and how they would overcome the obstacles between them and civilization that they’re trying to reach, and unlike the rest of the book, I didn’t want to stop reading at this point. There are some similar obstacles in the rest of the book, but fewer, and they don’t seem to be as significant.