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I’m a long time Kristin Hannah fan. She started off  writing women’s fiction and I often recommended her books to Danielle Steel readers who wanted to step up a bit. Then she wrote The Nightingale, and never looked back. That book lingered on the NY Times bestseller list for well over a year, a real anomoly for fiction and certainly well deserved. The Great Alone debuted at number one on that list and I have a feeling this book, too, shall linger.

Leni Allbright is a young teenager who has lived a difficult life. Her father, Ernt, is a Vietnam war vet obviously suffering from severe PTSD, undiagnosed and untreated at that time. Her mom, Cora, loves her husband madly and truly seems to understand the demons that drive him. He can’t hold a job, he drinks to much, and he has black moods on a regular basis. Leni has a harder time, but knows her father loves her. Leni and her mom are very close, unusually close for a child that age, but the family constantly moves, often several times a year, due to Ernt’s troubles, so Leni and Cora cling to each other.

Ernt receives a letter from the father of an old army buddy of who had died in the war, informing him that his buddy has left him 40 acres and a house in the wilds of Alaska. This book opens in 1974 in the pre-cruise era, and even the cities in Alaska weren’t all that populated. Ernt decides this is just the break he needs and he loads his family into an old VW bus and they make the drive from Seattle to Alaska.

They arrive in the tiny town and are amazed – the main street has a general store and a bar and not much else. The population is in the double digits and everyone who lives there is living off the grid – no electricity, no running water, just spectacular vistas and a very hard life. Fortunately, they arrive in spring so they have the summer to prepare for the long, hard winter. Ernt seems happy, and Cora and Leni are enjoying learning to hunt, how to can fruits and vegetables for winter, how to smoke fish and so forth. Leni goes to school in the one room schoolhouse and makes her first real friend. But as darkness falls on Alaska, so does Ernt’s mood.

This is a fascinating look at a life most of us would never experience, living entirely off the land and bartering for whatever else you need. It is also a coming of age story, a story about the effects of war, about an abusive marriage, anarchy, and more. While the storyline is nothing like The Nightingale, it is about two strong women and the life they build, something Hannah excels at. This is not a happy story, but a dark, searing one that will be staying with me for a very long time. It is such a gripping novel that I just couldn’t put it down and I can’t wait to talk to someone who has read it – it will make a fabulous book discussion. Don’t miss it.

2/18 Stacy Alesi, AKA the BookBitch

THE GREAT ALONE by Kristin Hannah.  Holtzbrinck Publishers; First Edition edition (February 6, 2018).  ISBN 978-0312577230. 448p.

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As regular readers probably know, in December I started having some trouble with my eyes. Reading becams difficult, but I perservered as long as I could. This forced me to become extremely discriminating in what I read until it became just impossible to read either print, on my iPad or the last to go, my Kindle. This is the last book I chose to start. I only got about a third of the way through it and I was so involved I even tried having my Kindle read it to me but I just couldn’t cope with that. So I set it aside. I had surgery, and week of horrendous recovery, and a few more weeks of tolerable recovery and my eyesight seemed to improve daily. It’s still not great, and computers are the most difficult for me to manage, but I have managed to read on my Kindle again. At first, I could only read for about ten minutes at a time, then my eyes would tire. So it took me an extraordinarily long time to finish this book, but I am so glad I did.

The story starts out in the late 1960’s on the Lower East side of New York. The Gold family, four siblings, have heard about a fortune teller who has recently come to their neighborhood. Apparently, she can predict the date of each client’s death. Intrigued, the children find her, and one at a time, she tells them their death dates. They are freaked out, as they should be, and take off without even paying her. But their lives are never really the same after that.

They don’t all share their dates, but hints are dropped. As they get older, this information steers how they live their lives. The youngest, Simon, realizes as a teen that he is gay and his sister Klara encourages him to move to San Francisco, and she lives with him. This is in the 1980’s at the beginning of the AIDS crisis and Harvey Milk and more. Klara becomes a magician and eventually moves to Las Vegas. The oldest son, Daniel, becomes a doctor and works for the armed services, determining who is fit to become a soldier and Vanya, the oldest daughter, becomes a research scientist studying, not ironically, longevity.

The book follows each of the lives until their deaths. It obviously poses the philosophical question if you knew when you were going to die, would you live your life differently? But it delves even further than that into relationships, both familial and others. It is beautifully written and each character drives their own story. Worthy of all the praise it has received, and certainly worthy of discussion. It is not a stretch to say that I’m sure it will be on my best books of the year list.

2/18 Stacy Alesi, AKA the BookBitch

THE IMMORTALISTS by Chloe Benjamin.  G.P. Putnam’s Sons; First Edition edition (January 9, 2018).  ISBN 978-0735213180. 352p.