The Great Alone

6/5 Stars – Emotionally Unwell and Low-Key Mad at Kristin Hannah

So apparently, Kristin Hannah’s goal with The Great Alone was to emotionally obliterate me and then casually walk away like it was no big deal. Mission accomplished, Kristin. Hope you’re happy.

This book is about a family that decides, “Hey, you know what sounds like a great idea? Moving to the middle of nowhere Alaska with zero survival skills and a boatload of trauma.” Spoiler alert: it goes exactly how you think it would.

Leni, our girl, is trying to grow up and find herself while dodging moose, surviving the wilderness, and also navigating the delightful chaos of an emotionally volatile father and a mother who deserves so much better. It’s like Little House on show more the Prairie meets The Shining, with bonus heartbreak.

The descriptions of Alaska? Breathtaking. So stunning that I briefly considered quitting my life to go live in a log cabin—until I remembered I complain when the Wi-Fi drops for two minutes.

By the end, I was a shell of a person. I cried. I yelled. I questioned why I thought this was a relaxing weekend read. And yet… it was amazing. The kind of book that grabs your soul, throws it around a bit, and then tenderly pats your head like, “There, there.”

Would I recommend it? Absolutely. Just don’t forget to hydrate—you’ll lose a lot of fluids from the crying. show less

Unforgettable saga set in the last American frontier.

In 1974, Ernt Albright, ex Vietnam War POW decides to move his wife and daughter to the outer reaches of northern Alaska where they will try to make a life in the wilds off the grid. None of them have a clue as to what awaits and how desperate and dire their circumstances once they arrive. Summer treats them well and Ernt, Cora, and Leni work through all the daylight hours preparing for the coming winter. They make friends with some of the neighbors and there is relative peace. Then the darkness comes, ushering in a time of peril for them all. And all the worst dangers are not outside in the treacherous climate and the wild animals are not their most terrible threat. The biggest show more problem is inside their small cabin. It’s Ernt.

This novel gives you all the feels as the Allbright’s experience in Alaska runs the gamut from exciting to bloodshed. As they develop the resilience and skill to handle their daily existence, it’s obvious that Ernt is breaking down and that Cora and Leni are in fraught situations. He’s a loose cannon and Cora’s bad decisions don’t help. Leni loves her mother desperately, but she can’t get Cora to see the truth about Ernt. And then the moment comes when Leni and Cora have to respond.

I typically do not care for coming of age plots and teenage main characters so it surprised me how much I loved this book. I also found that Alaska itself was another main character and I could see the appeal of that wild place to a certain type of person. Me, on the other hand, lazy type princess who loves to have everything nice and fresh and clean, can’t wait to go to the grocery store and shop, could not have lasted a day there. I’m not cut out for that pioneer lifestyle, but I definitely admired those characters in the book for how they thrived and became part of their land.

I was able to listen to the audiobook narrated by the fabulous Julia Whelan. Her voice and passion really gave the characters distinct personalities and brought them all to life. It definitely enhanced my enjoyment of the story.

Highly recommend this. I’m sure I will be thinking about it for a long time. show less

Two kinds of folks come up to Alaska: People running to something and people running 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: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.

Leni Allbright and her parents Cora and Ernt, a man deeply scared by war and captivity, inherit land in Alaska and move there to start over. This book is about the majesty, beauty, rawness, and horrors of Alaska. Stats like five out of a thousand people disappear there every year. And yet, they are warmly embraced by the locals, who work to show more help them survive. The darkness of winter eventually gets the better of Ernt, while Leni finally finds a true friend in the son of the family who first settled in the area and adapts to her new surroundings. The omnipresent pressure to develop tourism and make Alaska hospitable is also a theme. However, disaster strikes, and the measure of friendship, love and family are deeply, deeply tested.

Another gem by Kristin Hannah, whose own history in and feelings about Alaska have no doubt contributed to this story. show less

Leni is just thirteen when Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone begins. She’s the new girl in school, but she is used to that. Her father often loses his job and pulls up stakes chasing dreams of a different life, but he brings his ghosts everywhere he goes. He’s only been home from Vietnam a couple years. He was a prisoner and suffers from PTSD–undiagnosed, of course–it didn’t get added to the official roster of psychiatric diagnoses until 1980. Her mother is a beautiful woman whose fragile beauty hides inner strength, but her love for her husband is toxic and dangerous.

A friend from Vietnam who did not make it out left his cabin and land on Kenai Peninsula in Alaska to Ernt, Leni’s father. He’s excited by the chance to show more start again, with land and a home for his family, to live off the land, to be self-sufficient. It’s 1974, a year of turmoil with terrorism, civil unrest, nuclear brinksmanship, and a criminal president. People were afraid. Some of us might relate. Ernt thought the wilderness was a safer place for his family and when they arrived, he found a fellow paranoiac survivalist to feed his conspiracies–not that they needed feeding.

Alaska is a place that makes or breaks people. It made Leni, Cora, her mother, found hidden strength there, too, learning to subsist through growing and hunting their own food. It broke Ernt, whose trauma left him ill-suited for the months of darkness and isolation. Life gets even more complicated as the years pass and Leni’s friendship with her classmate Matthew deepens into love. Matthew is the son of a man her father hates with a murderous passion. Leni knows this is dangerous and may end in tragedy, but love is powerful and tempting.

The story makes a few jumps in time, from 1974 when it begins, to 1978, Leni’s senior year and to 1986 when the story closes–for all intents and purposes. There is an interview with one of the characters in 2009, a silly and extraneous addition.

This is a heart-wrenching story, thrilling and fascinating. The characters are so well-defined and rich. There’s Leni, smart, loving, and the heart of the story. There is her mother Cora whose great flaw is loving unwisely and too much. There is Ernt, her father, who loves his family but not well, not enough to put their welfare above his fears and trauma. Then there is Alaska, beautiful and magnificent, implacable and deadly, as complex a character as any person and certainly as important to the story. It seasons forming the rhythm of their lives and their troubles.

Hannah does an excellent job of showing the infuriating resistance many abused women have to the idea of leaving their abusers. She also makes clear the catch-22 abused women navigate, balancing the risk of abuse against the risk of leaving and inciting murderous fury. Hannah is very good at getting at human emotion, at developing characters we care about. Hell, we even care about Ernt–most of the time.

I only wish the ending were less complete. Hannah began her career writing romances and she has the romance author’s desire to tie things up with a bow. There is also a ridiculous police officer who has never heard of Miranda and a laughably bad courtroom scene complete with an absurdist bit of rector ex machina. I would advise Hannah to avoid any future legal plot elements. I can’t say exactly where I wish she had ended the story, but I wish she had left us with unknown possibilities.

I received an e-galley of The Great Alone from the publisher through NetGalley.

The Great Alone at Macmillan | St. Martin’s Press
Kristin Hannah author site

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2018/02/08/the-great-alone-by-kristi... show less

When Leni's father returns from Vietnam, he has changed. He has sudden bursts of rage which make it difficult for him to hold a job and keeps both Leni and her mother constantly making sure they aren't doing anything that might set him off. So when he decides that they will pack up and move to a small, isolated community in Alaska, they both agree. Life on a farmstead in Alaska is hard, but Leni makes a friend in the only other child her age at the school and she grows to love Alaska. But as the years progress, her father's paranoia and extremism increase, alienating everyone they know and the long winter nights make his rages worse. But what can Leni do when her mother refuses to leave?

This is the first novel I've read by Kristen show more Hannah and, while it was fine, it will probably be the last. While the setting was wonderful, the secondary characters were reliably one-note and didn't change over the course of the novel. And there was so much drama. Just tons of it. And then there would be more. But I can see why this was a bestseller, I certainly kept turning the pages, long after I'd begun rolling my eyes with every new plot development. show less

Danger presents itself in the Alaska wild in a multitude of ways -- blizzards; long, dark winters; wolves and bears; lack of heat, electricity, running water -- all the obvious dangers. Then we see that the biggest danger is back at home and lies within the very troubled mind of someone already having difficulty coping before moving to this land, brought on by jealousy of the neighbors and imaginings of big brother coming for you or your freedoms... or your guns. These are the struggles Ernt Allbright is grappling with when he brings his wife and daughter Leni to his cabin in the woods, which he inherited from a buddy in Nam. He also inherited PTSD; and the long dark months + drinking too much + a crazy neighbor + all of the above = show more DANGER to the nth degree.

For Leni, she knows to avoid the triggers that will set her father off. Her mother treads softly as well, but too often that isn't enough and someone ends up being punched. Wonderful neighbors (great characters all of them) keep an eye on Leni and Cora, but that isn't always enough. Leni meets a boy named Matthew in school, and he becomes her best and only friend. Ernt is jealous of Matthew's father, though, so in his usual fashion forbids any kind of relationship.

I think Kristen Hannah's descriptions are breathtaking here and her writing overall just keeps improving since her earlier romantic tomes; but sometimes even here the romantic scenes and dialog felt overwrought to me:
"He took her in his arms and kissed her with everything he had and all he hoped to have." Oh puh-lease.
I loved the Alaska setting that filled the first half of the book, as I have been to the Homer area and always enjoy reading about familiar places. In the more emotional latter half, I felt less love. 3.5 stars. show less

The Great Alone is a gripping blend of survival story and coming-of-age novel set in 1970s Alaska. It follows a family seeking a fresh start in the remote wilderness, only to find that isolation brings its own dangers.
Hannah’s characters feel vividly real, and the warmth and resilience of the small community that welcomes them adds depth and heart to the story. At the same time, the novel does not shy away from darker themes. The lingering trauma of war manifests in cycles of domestic violence within the family, intensifying during the harsh winter months and leading to devastating consequences.
Both beautiful and unsettling, this novel captures the brutal power of nature alongside the fragility—and strength—of human relationships.