Well, I’ll be darned, somebody can actually write a novel without flip-flopping from the present to the past or the past to the present and write with an incredible grace and awareness of the novel’s direction. Give praise to Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nightingale (see my review of 10/9/2015), for her tragic story of a ex-POW from the Vietnam War who takes his family to Alaska to either rehabilitate himself, or destroy everybody around him. If you like tension, then this is the novel for you...bone crushing tension. Can Kristin write a novel with all this trepidation and still have the reader feel empathy for the six main characters and beyond? Is the sky blue? If you want to study writing...use this novel as one of your required readings. The only fault(s) I found in her novel was that the ending was a tad bit corny and the last 34 pages came to a final resolve way too quickly (could have been drawn-out for at least another 100 pages).
The time period for this novel is 1974 through 1986. You will meet Ernt (not spelled wrong) Allbright, his beautiful wife, Cora, and his redheaded daughter, Leni, who is thirteen years old. Ernt has a bad habit of beating up his wife whenever something doesn’t go his way. The next day he apologizes to a quickly forgiving Cora. They feel that all his problems are related to when he was a POW in Vietnam. Ernt was forced to watch his best friend, Bo Harlan, killed right in front of him at the POW camp. Ernt, on the surface, appears to be a loving parent except when he loses another job and gets drunk. Then it’s beating time for Cora with an apology the next morning. So here we have a drunken wife-beater heading for perdition until he gets a letter from Bo’s father, who lives in the untamed part of Alaska. It’s Earl Harlan (aka Mad Earl) and he writes to Ernt that Bo wanted him to have his 40 acres of land with a cabin if he died in Vietnam. He writes Ernt that, “a hardworking man can live off the land up here, away from the crazies and the hippies and the mess in the lower forty-eight.”
“Leni had seen all of this before (the many moves). Ultimately, it didn’t matter what she or mama wanted. Dad wanted a new beginning. Needed it. And mama needed him to be happy. 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 would do as she was asked and do it with a good attitude. She would be the new girl in school again. Because that was what love was.” So after eleven pages, Kristine Hannah, has already set the stage for this wonderful novel. Will Ernt turn his life around and become a everyday father? Or will he get nasty in the land where everybody was always preparing for winter. Here’s a later thought from Ernt’s wife, Cora, “Once winter came...three nightmares a week also came.” It seemed to me that the habitual statement from Ernt to Cora was…”I’m so sorry. I love you so much...it makes me crazy.” This was a novel that you had to savor...so I took the whole month to read Kristin’s story! 👍👍👍👍👍
RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
Comment: This is the third book that I’ve read where the story was based in Alaska. And they were all good. The first one that I read was required reading when I was in school...a long time ago. It was Jack London’s The Call of the Wild , originally published in 1903. Goodreads.com says the following about London’s novel:
"The Call of the Wild is regarded as Jack London’s masterpiece. Based on London’s experiences as a gold prospector in the Canadian wilderness and his ideas about nature and the struggle for existence, The Call of the Wild is a tale about unbreakable spirit and the fight for survival in the frozen Alaskan Klondike."
The second book that I’ve read and reviewed was Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child (see my review of 4/13/2013). “I thought the novel was full of symbolism out of an old Russian fairy tale.” I also said, “I found this novel haunting and thought-provoking, especially after I finished the novel.”
