The Great Alone: A Novel

Reviews

1. 

   BC – July 24, 2024

   a sad portrait of a woman who tolerates abuse
   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.

2. 

   Misa – July 24, 2024

   The Great Alone
   The book was depicted exceptionally well to the point that sometimes had to put it down as it was a struggle to walk in the journey with an alcoholic WW veteran, who was so angry and abusive. The story was very suspense filled and at times quite sad. Definitely a great read! The author is excellent in keeping her stories exciting!

3. 

   Caron – July 24, 2024

   I loved this book!

4. 

   Claire louise – July 24, 2024

   This was my first KH book and oh my, it was such an emotional roller coaster. It really put me in all feels and had me crying at the end.Set In the beautiful Alaskan wilderness I was totally transported. I love books with this type of wild outdoors setting and this was described perfectly. I can imagine so well the small town and how it must have been back in the 70s.The Harlan compound I could see as clear as day in my mind and Bos land etc.The depiction of the abuse Cora and Leni suffered , was handled sensitively and written with such rawness , that it took me back to being a scared little kid in similar circumstances.Ernst was vile .The love story between Matthew and Leni was beautiful and tragic. I’m so sad about what Cora had to endure , i so wanted her to leave and I was praying her and Tom would get together.The community spirit shone through at every given opportunity. Finding strength in numbers, courage to start over again. It raises so many questions on what would you have done in that situation?

5. 

   Charlie – July 24, 2024

   It is beautiful story written beautifully. I love it. Leni and Cora both were the fighters. I admire them both. Looking forward to visiting Alaska very soon.

6. 

   jackey – July 24, 2024

   The book is well written and the author manages to make us imagine and even visualize the expanse of the Alaskan landscape. Also, the protagonist and her father are well defined characters. With Cora, though, the writer fails to give us a true character: she is flat, pathetic, with no backbone. A victim of the worst kind. The plot, too, is not particularly interesting. Something could have been improved.