I was captivated from this novel from the beginning. So many factors are involved: Broken people with broken souls; family abuse; a sad portrait of a woman who tolerates abuse; the effects of abuse on a child; the tragedy of a Viet Nam Vet's post-war mental breakdown of his once good soul. For me, however, the most poignant and educational factors were the descriptions of a wild, desolate, beautiful Alaska in the 1970's. And the stories behind the characters involved who lived there - and played vital roles to the main characters. The tension is palpable. The story is mesmerizing, soulful, heartbreaking, suspenseful. It's one of those rare novels that had me breaking my rule of reading only at bedtime...I had to find out 'what's happening next?".
If the following passages do not whet the appetite, I don't know what will:
"Two kinds of folks come up to Alaska, Cora. People running to something and people running away from something. The second kind-you want to keep your eye out for them. And it isn't just the people you need to watch out for, either. Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There's a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you."
"Even her laugh seemed at home here, an echo of the bells that tinkled from wind chimes in front of the shops."
"Leni stared down at the sea, rolling inexorably toward her. Nothing you did could hold back that rising tide. One mistake or miscalculation and you could be stranded or washed away. All you could do was protect yourself by reading the charts and being prepared and making smart choices."
"She was sweating hard, scooping a bucket of water from the creek, slopping it across her boots, when night fell. And she meant FELL; it hit hard and fast, like a lid clanging down on its pot."
"Dad's intentions were good, but even so, it was like living with a wild animal. Like those crazy hippies the Alaskans talked about who lived with wolves and bears and invariably ended up getting killed. The natural-born predator could seem domesticated, even friendly, could lick your throat affectionately or rub up against you to get a back scratch. But you knew, or should know, that it was a wild thing you lived with, that a collar and leash and a bowl of food might tame the actions of the beast, but couldn't change its essential nature. In a split second,, less time than it took to exhale a breath, that wolf could claim its nature and turn, fangs bared."
"A girl was like a kite; without her mother's strong, steady hold on the string, she might just flat away, be lost somewhere among the clouds."
"Fear and shame she understood. Fear made you run and hide and shame made you stay quiet, but this anger wanted something else. Release."
"There it was: the sad truth. Mama loved him too much to leave him. Still, even now, with her face bruised and swollen. Maybe what she'd always said was true, maybe she couldn't breathe without him, maybe she'd wilt like a flower without the sunshine of his adoration."
"Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you. No one cared if you had an old car on your deck, let alone a rusted fridge. Any life that could be imagined could be lived up here."
"It made Leni feel as if she were a coil of rope drawn around a cleat with the wind pulling at it, tugging, the rope creaking in resistance, slipping. If the line wasn't perfectly tied down, it would all come undone, be torn away, maybe the wind would pull the cleat from its home in fury."
"There were a lot of bumper stickers like that out here, deep in Alaska's wild interior, far from the tourist destinations of the coast or the majestic beauty of Denali. Alaska was full of fringe-ists. People who believed in weirdo things and prayed to exclusionary Gods and filled their basements with equal measures of guns and Bibles. If you wanted to live in a place where no one told you what to do and didn't care if you parked a trailer in your yard or had a fridge on your porch, Alaska was the state for you."
"The farther away you got from civilization, the stranger things got. Most people spent one dark, bleak, eight-month winter in Fairbanks and left the state screaming. The few who stayed-misfits, adventurers, romantics, loners-rarely left again."
"Sometimes you had to go backward in order to go forward."
"He hadn't realized how time could unspool the years of your life until for a second you were fourteen again, crying from a place so deep it seemed to predate you, desperate to be whole again."
"Time was not something she usually paid much attention to. On the homestead, the bigger picture mattered-the darkening of the sky, the ebbing of the tide, the snow hares changing color, the birds returning or flying south. That was how they marked the passage of time, in growing seasons and salmon runs, and the first snowfall."
"After that and all the way home, he said nothing, which should have been better than yelling, but it wasn't. Yelling was like a bomb in the corner: you saw it, watched the fuse burn, and you knew when it would explode and you needed to run for cover. Not speaking was a killer somewhere in your house with a gun when you were sleeping."
"Love and fear. The most destructive forces on earth. Fear had turned her inside out, love had made her stupid."
"Five out of every thousand people went missing in Alaska every year, were lost. That was a known fact. They fell down crevasses, lost their way on trails, drowned in a rising tide. Alaska. The Great Alone."
"Someone said to me once that Alaska didn't create character; it revealed it."
"This state, this place, is like no other. It is beauty and horror; savior and destroyer. Here, where survival is a choice that must be made over and over, in the wildest place in America, on the edge of civilization, where water in all its forms can kill you, you learn who you are........You learn what you will do to survive. That lesson, that revelation, as my mother once told me about love, is Alaska's great and terrible gift. Those who come for beauty alone, or for some imaginary life, or those who seek safety, will fail. In the vast expanse of this unpredictable wilderness, you will either become your best self and flourish, or you will run away, screaming, from the dark and the cold and the hardship. There is no middle ground, no safe place; not here, in the Great Alone."
The physical descriptions throughout the novel are ethereal...you can touch and feel and see what the author paints for you.
I think the author did an exquisite job with this novel - my one-time journey through Alaska will never be forgotten.
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Popular Highlights in this book
In real life, she saw, it wasn’t like that. It was sadness opening up inside of you, changing how you saw the world.Highlighted by 4,873 Kindle readers- “The Great Alone,” Leni said. That was what Robert Service called Alaska.Highlighted by 4,399 Kindle readers
- They were trapped, by environment and finances, but mostly by the sick, twisted love that bound her parents together.Highlighted by 4,088 Kindle readers
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The Great Alone: A Novel
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About the author
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Kristin Hannah Has Outdone Herself!
Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2018
I've always loved to read and I first discovered Kristin Hannah's books just over five years ago. I ended up buying all of books that were currently published and tore through them quickly. Since then, I've read every new release she's had. I've thoroughly enjoyed all of her books but my favorites are The Nightingale, Winter Garden, Home Front, and now, The Great Alone. I was so excited to see a new book was coming out just before my birthday (happy birthday to me!) so I pre-ordered the hardcover copy since a good friend of mine also loves her novels and frequently borrows my books!The Great Alone is Kristin Hannah's newest novel about one dysfunctional family's journey to Alaska during the 1970s. Lenora (Leni) Allbright is 13 years old and lives with her parents, Ernt and Coraline, in Washington State. Her dad returned from Vietnam quite different from the man he used to be and now Leni and her mom have to tiptoe around him in order to avoid his explosive, destructive behavior. After Ernt receives word that he has inherited land in Alaska, the last American frontier, he makes a rash decision, without any knowledge of what life there will be like. While Alaska has many benefits during this time, there are also several ways for people to get lost, disappear, or lose themselves during Alaska's endless winter darkness.I started reading this book the same day I got it (release day) and I've loved every minute of it! It takes me a long time to read books since I'm busy with my family and taking care of myself but that just means that I got to prolong the enjoyment of reading this novel. I've never been to Alaska, though my in-laws have, and Kristin Hannah's descriptive writing painted a beautiful picture of what it would be like to live there in the 1970s. This novel seems to be thoroughly researched and, based on the Acknowledgements section at the end, Kristin Hannah consulted people who helped her with information of Alaska during the 1970s. I was also intrigued to know that Kristin Hannah and her family were very adventurous and traveled around until they found their home in the Pacific Northwest and later, in Alaska.Regardless of if you have read any of Kristin Hannah's novels or not, I highly recommend reading The Great Alone! It's an amazing novel, written with such emotion and detail to the land and characters. Kristin Hannah has earned a spot on my shelf of favorite authors, alongside Jodi Picoult, and I highly recommend checking out this book and many of Hannah's other novels. I also feel this would make a great book club read!
Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2018
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