Peace In The Margins

“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.“

Alright – so here it goes. I read the final word on the final page about a two months ago…sigh. The residual impact from this difficult to describe tale is still resounding in my soul. My sister-in-law described it as, “I’m still in a relationship with these characters.”

The Great Alone reminded me why writing – and reading is a personal and oftentimes passionate experience. My book club will be discussing this in June, and I’m impatiently waiting. But in the meantime, I need to deal with this tale on a personal level – get it out of my system so-to-speak – so, here is my review.

It’s a third-person telling from a first-person perspective. Let me explain – from the very beginning of the story you know whose eyes the reader is looking through, but it isn’t written in first person – it is written in third-person.

He pulled Mama to her feet with an eagerness that made her stumble, fall into him. Leni saw the desperate edge of his enthusiasm.

This one simple moment shows so much of the foundation for the story – it paints the father as unpredictable and violent, the mother as submissive and battered, and Leni as the observer living within their world. Brilliant!

Another very cool nuance is that while this is a tale of love, adventure, survival, and relational bonds – The Great Alone also has a watermarked theme of how books are tangible yet momentary vacations allowing for escape from the violent reality of real-world issues. Over and over, woven within the pages is Leni’s relationship with books; “her friends…spine out, waiting for her as they always had.”

Leni’s opinion of books is recorded as,

Books are the mile markers of my life. Some people have family photos or home movies to record their past. I’ve got books. Characters. For as long as I can remember, books have been my safe place.

Even with her constant friends, Leni wasn’t able to physically escape the violent certainty of her situation. The heart-wrenching tale of a PTSD ridden father and a mother whose love was bigger than the state to which they were heading begs the reader to vicariously experience this world through the daughter who hadn’t yet found her place in the world. Thrust into this strained family environment is a spontaneous move to Alaska!

But when she [Alaska] gets her hooks in you, she digs deep and holds on, and you become hers. Wild. A lover of cruel beauty and splendid isolation. And God help you, you can’t live anywhere else.

One of my favorite characters, Large Marge, described Alaska in my favorite quote of the book:

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.

If that’s not foreshadowing, I don’t know what is…

Hannah’s word choice and writing style reached in and grabbed my guts – she described the landscape and the seasons as if Alaska herself were a living breathing character with her very own story to share. And wasn’t she?

Winter tightened its grip on Alaska…The darkness seemed to be rising rather than the sun falling. As if darkness were the natural order around here.

A constant theme thought the novel is that life is fragile – and people are vulnerable to this fragility. And in the midst of vulnerability, love is inherently difficult and wonderful all at once! This is definitely the case when I think about Matthew and Leni’s love. I want to stay away from spoilers in this review, but I will say – Leni’s relationship with her dad comes to a head, thus creating a trickle-down series of events that will shake up the small village and the budding romance between Matthew and Leni. The conclusion is a resolution of sorts – but probably isn’t the feel-good-everything-always-works-out one most readers expect. [Take into account this is my first Kristen Hannah read, and I’m aware from other bloggers/podcasts that this is a typical style for her.]

Some readers were disappointed with the ending – they wanted more. Maybe not more positivity, but just more. I agree with others who thought the resolution was too rushed, but I remain resolute that rushed or not, this was a story that grabbed my heart and has yet to let go.

Unsolicited review.

Until Next Time,

Alicia