Thomas's Reviews > The Great Alone

12-31-17
My wife really enjoyed this book and gave it 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5. She found it to be quite different from the 2 other books that she has read by this author. It is still about relationships, but different from Winter Garden and True Colors. Since it takes place in Alaska and the author lived there for awhile, there may be some autobiographical background. My wife said the more she read, the more invested she was in the story and the characters. There was one character that she wanted to smack upside the head. On another character, she said "Some people need killing."
I will add my thoughts when I read it.
3-5-18 My thoughts 4.5 stars rounded up to 5.
This book is about love and loss. It is about domestic violence and teenage love that endures. It is about a woman who stays with an abusive man because she feels trapped and hopes that he will return to the man that he was before being taken prisoner in Vietnam.
Ernt Allbright is a broken man who can't hold a job. Before Vietnam, he was a cheerful loving husband to Cora. Now he is moody and unpredictable. He receives a letter from Earl Harlan, the father of his best friend Bo,in Vietnam. Earl has decided to give Bo's 40 acres of land in Kaneq, Alaska to Ernt. Ernt takes Cora and their 13 year old daughter Leni to Alaska for a new beginning. But the long, dark Alaskan winter causes him to spiral downwards. The book is narrated by Leni, who grows up over the course of the book.
If the domestic violence bothers you, please don't give up. You will like the ending.
Some quotes:
Moving to Alaska: "So they would try again in a new place, hoping geography would be the answer. They would go to Alaska in search of this new dream."
Leni's first sight of Alaska: "It was otherworldly somehow, magical in its vast expanse, an incomparable landscape of soaring glacier filled white mountains that ran the lenght of the horizon, knife tip points pressed high into a cloudless cornflower-blue sky."
Title: "The great alone, Leni said. That was what Robert Service called Alaska."
Thanks to NetGalley, St. Martin's Press and the author for sending me this ARC ebook.