The Great Alone: A Novel

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.

Look, I’m not gonna lie here. I don’t even know how to put into words what I just read and the 8000 emotions still going through my body. This is the first book I have read by this author and I had no idea what to expect although I had heard she had many great books. It just happened that this book was the one chosen by my book club, and man what a powerful book and story told in a unique, poignant, beautiful, emotional way.

This book will take you on one of the most incredulous journeys you have ever been on. Starting in the 1970s this story begins about a family where the husband has come home from Vietnam and how he is so different than the man who went to Vietnam. What you find throughout the story is that it is about so much more than this one family and the hidden secrets that they have, the things that they endure and more importantly, the things that they survive. You learn about Alaska, and all of its beauty that radiates every day. You are drawn in to feel the darkness that happens in Alaska and what that means not just for this family, but for everybody who lives in the community. You are shown just how important community can be and what other people are willing to do when they believe in something.

Kristin Hannah does an exquisite job of making you feel everything that everybody is feeling. You will find yourself holding your breath on the edge of your seat, waiting to see what comes next. The story has long, lasting love, all the love, Young love, it showcases the love between parents and children in multiple ways in multiple generations, and how there can be so many different outcomes and scenarios.

You will find yourself wrapped up in so much loss, but not always the type of loss you think may be coming. Some may be loss of a person, some may be loss of hope, of faith, of a relationship, the lengths that some people will go to in the name of love are breathtaking, painful, and shocking.

I can only imagine which each person felt throughout this book, and how that affected every choice that they made. You discover that there are always consequences to whatever choice you make sometimes good sometimes bad, but you have to live with that. From chapter 26 to the end of the book in itself is some of the most incredible heart wrenching written words I have ever read in my life. If all of this authors books are like that, I can only imagine months filled with tears. I cried so hard and uncontrollably for the last several chapters that my poor husband had no idea what was going on. While this book is long, I implore you to stick with it and finish it because it is a literary great novel that I hope will someday be made into a movie or a TV series.

The things I loved about the book: Well written with complex characters; sometimes frustrating in their decisions but also with back stories that helped me understand what drove them. Hannah paints a vivid picture of the Alaskan wilderness that makes me want to visit (but not live there). Even though the book had a satisfying ending for me it wasn’t neatly tied up and left me imagining what life would be like after the story was over. There are many relevant topics woven throughout the story and handled in a way that wasn’t “preachy.” Overall, a great read that was hard to put down.

On the first page, 13-year-old Leni wakes to the sound of her parents arguing. Again. The weather in Washington State is dark and threatening—and it turns her father dark and threatening, too. Ernt survived a Vietnamese POW camp and has the physical and psychological scars to prove it. Life with and for Ernt is hard. He can’t keep a job, so the family gets by on Cora’s waitress salary. Leni has gone to five schools in four years. She is the perpetual new girl, the one without friends or nice clothes. She escapes into books and feels she is the only adult in her family.

The larger scene is just as dreary: a nation divided by Vietnam, bombings by radical groups, hijacked planes, the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the Munich Olympics massacre, and Watergate. When Ernt gets a letter from the father of his Army buddy who didn’t make it home, he learns his friend has left him his cabin in Alaska. Without a job or much thought, he moves his family there for a better life.

The cabin is isolated and barely habitable, and with winter coming on, the family is totally unprepared for the realities of life in Alaska. Still, with the help of long-time Alaskan transplants, the family begins to make a place for themselves.

But Ernt’s problems have followed him. As winter arrives, the long, dark days take a toll on Ernt’s mental health, and Leni finds herself in the adult position again, and this time she’s really scared.

The Great Alone is the ugly story of the twisted love and jealousy that fuels an abusive marriage and fails to protect Leni. But it’s also a love letter to Alaska in all its beautiful wildness and to the resilient, modern-day pioneers who left everything behind to create a new life for themselves. The writing is fluid, and the characters are believable.