This chapter examines three contemporary novels aimed at a young adult audience that move from one example of realistic fiction: Marcus Sedgewick'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. At focus is 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.