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| Categories | Genre Fiction |
| Author | Kristin Hannah |
| Publisher | St. Martin’s Griffin; Reprint edition (September 24, 2019) |
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 576 pages |
| Item Weight | 1 pounds |
| Dimensions |
5.5 x 1.5 x 8.2 inches |
I. Book introduction
In Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone, a desperate family seeks a new beginning in the near-isolated wilderness of Alaska only to find that their unpredictable environment is less threatening than the erratic behavior found in human nature.
Alaska, 1974. Ernt Allbright came home from the Vietnam War a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes the impulsive decision to move his wife and daughter north where they will live off the grid in America’s last true frontier.
Cora will do anything for the man she loves, even if means following him into the unknown. Thirteen-year-old Leni, caught in the riptide of her parents’ passionate, stormy relationship, has little choice but to go along, daring to hope this new land promises her family a better future.
In a wild, remote corner of Alaska, the Allbrights find a fiercely independent community of strong men and even stronger women. The long, sunlit days and the generosity of the locals make up for the newcomers’ lack of preparation and dwindling resources.
But as winter approaches and darkness descends, Ernt’s fragile mental state deteriorates. Soon the perils outside pale in comparison to threats from within. In their small cabin, covered in snow, blanketed in eighteen hours of night, Leni and her mother learn the terrible truth: they are on their own.
Editorial Reviews
“Featuring a rich cast of characters and elevated by the riveting portrayal of homesteading in Alaska in the 1970s, this is a compassionate story of a family.” ―People, “Book of the Week”
“This epic atmospheric novel examines humans’ will to endure the unthinkable.” ―Real Simple magazine
“There are many great things about this book…It will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet-like coming of age story and domestic potboiler. She recreates in magical detail the lives of Alaska’s homesteaders…and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America. A tour de force.” ―Kirkus (starred review)
“Hannah vividly evokes the natural beauty and danger of Alaska and paints a compelling portrait of a family in crisis and a community on the brink of change.” ―Booklist
“Reliably alluring…The Great Alone is packed with rapturous descriptions of Alaskan scenery… Hannah remembers and summons an undeveloped wilderness, describing a gloriously pristine region in the days before cruise ships discovered it.” ―New York Times
“In this latest from Hannah, the landscape is hard and bleak but our young heroine learns to accept it and discover her true self…fans will appreciate the astuteness of the story and the unbreakable connection between mother and child.” ―Library Journal
“Hannah skillfully situates the emotional family saga in the events and culture of the late ’70s… But it’s her tautly drawn characters―Large Marge, Genny, Mad Earl, Tica, Tom―who contribute not only to Leni’s improbable survival but to her salvation amid her family’s tragedy.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Hannah turns the written word into wonderful prose…Times are difficult for so many in this novel and Hannah captures their suffering with sensitivity. The author expertly shows how love, death and birth run the full circle of life.” ―RT Book Reviews
Praise for The Nightingale:
“Haunting, action-packed, and compelling.”―Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“Absolutely riveting!…Read this book.” ―Dr. Miriam Klein Kassenoff, Director of the University of Miami Holocaust Teacher Institute
“Beautifully written and richly evocative.” ―Sara Gruen,#1 New York Times bestselling author
“A heart-pounding story.” ―USA Today
“A respectful and absorbing page-turner.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“Tender, compelling…a satisfying slice of life in Nazi-occupied France.” ―Jewish Book Council
“Expect to devour The Nightingale in as few sittings as possible; the high-stakes plot and lovable characters won’t allow any rest until all of their fates are known.” ―Shelf Awareness
“Powerful…an unforgettable portrait of love and war.”―People
About Kristin Hannah
Kristin Hannah (born September 25, 1960) is an American writer. Her most notable works include Winter Garden, The Nightingale, Firefly Lane, The Great Alone, and The Four Winds. In 2024, St. Martin’s Publishing Group published her novel, The Women, which is set in America in the 1960s.
Kristin Hannah was born in California. After graduating with a degree in communication from the University of Washington, Hannah worked at an advertising agency in Seattle. She graduated from the University of Puget Sound law school and practiced law in Seattle before becoming a full-time writer. Hannah wrote her first novel with her mother, who was dying of cancer at the time, but the book was never published.
Hannah’s best-selling work, The Nightingale, has sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide and has been published in 45 languages.
Hannah lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington, with her husband and their son.
II. Reviewer: The Great Alone
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1. EMILY MAY reviews for The Great Alone
All this time, Dad had taught Leni how dangerous the outside world was. The truth was that the biggest danger of all was in her own home.
This book completely stole my heart. Maybe it’s just more fresh in my mind, but I’m pretty sure I enjoyed The Great Alone even more than Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale. In fact, it was verging on a five-star read for me until the final few chapters– which I felt were too rushed and more sentimental than I personally like. But I still highly recommend it.
I loved the atmosphere that Hannah created. She deftly draws the wild beauty of the Alaskan landscape, painting it as the visually stunning and dangerous place it is. Set in the 1970s and 80s, this is about a family of three arriving at the last frontier in search of a different kind of life. And, boy, do they get it.
The Allbrights must work themselves to the bone just to survive the perilous winter in Alaska, but we soon learn that for thirteen-year-old Leni and her mother Cora, there are dangers far greater and far closer to home than black bears and the freezing climate.
They were trapped, by environment and finances, but mostly by the sick, twisted love that bound her parents together.
The author wraps up a survival story inside a survival story. As the family grapple with raising livestock and gathering supplies for the long winter, they also must deal with the fragile, abusive dynamics that exist within their home. Ernt is a Vietnam veteran suffering from PTSD before anyone knew what PTSD was and this, in turn, leads to violent episodes and paranoid behaviour that threatens the safety of his family.
The complexity of the characters makes this book something extra special. You hate Ernt, and yet are forced to acknowledge that he is dealing with a mental illness back when no one was willing to call it such. You feel frustrated at Cora for sticking by him, and yet she is clearly a victim of abuse. Add to this mix a set of charming secondary characters, a budding romance, snowstorms, near-death experiences and animal encounters, and you have a book that is utterly enthralling.
I especially liked how the author captured the feeling of these Alaskans living in a isolated bubble of their own, being afraid of the “Outside” and the possibility of change. You can draw parallels between this and anyone who has ever desired to put up a wall to keep the “Other” out. Ernt – as well as others in their tiny town – wants to protect the community from any kind of change; from anyone who might come in and affect their way of life. It is, of course, paranoid and delusional.
I could probably go on and on forever, but I’ll just say I loved almost all of it. I loved how, like in The Nightingale, Hannah shows the importance and the strength of the relationships between female characters. I loved the Alaskan setting and the multiple tales of survival against the odds. And I loved how everything had something of a fairy tale quality to it, dark places and broken dreams included.
Mama had quit high school and ��� lived on love.” That was how she always put it, the fairy tale. Now Leni was old enough to know that like all fairy tales, theirs was filled with thickets and dark places and broken dreams, and runaway girls.
2. JESSICA reviews for The Great Alone
its books like this that remind me why reading is such a passionate and worthwhile constant in my life. i have come to rely on books to help me learn, grown, empathise, and sometimes escape. and this story did all of that.
but what i am grateful for, most of all, is how i was able to read about a place i have never been and fall in love with it, how i could find an undeniable softness for the harsh landscape of the alaskan wilderness, how i could come to understand the pure beauty of a place i have never seen.
“for we few, the sturdy, the strong, the dreamers, alaska is home, always and forever, the song you hear when the world is still and quiet. you either belong here, wild and untamed yourself, or you dont.”
i loved being able to accompany leni as she came of age and learned to call alaska and its people home. yes, this story can be a bit dramatic at times. yes, there is a lot going on. i even saw a review describing this as the hallmark channel movie of books, and i totally get that. but none of that could lessen the deep feeling i got reading about leni find love in where she lived and with a boy who saw her.
what a special story.
↠ 4.5 stars
3. MATTHEW reviews for The Great Alone
What a story! I mentioned this in one of my status updates and I think it is the best way to describe this book: every new scene in this book is out of the frying pan and into the fire!
My wife recommended this book to me and we usually have a pretty good idea of what the other will like (probably a 95% success rate). We have both read and enjoyed The Nightingale, which is probably what Hannah is best known for even though she has quite an extensive resume of novels. This book is quite unlike The Nightingale, and, dare I say, even better.
At first I thought it started slow and I was having trouble connecting to it. But, about 1/3 of the way through the intensity and the story really ramped up. From then on out it is a rollercoaster suspense-thriller-tear jerker that warms the heart and will terrify you with the possibilities of the human condition.
I can easily recommend this to almost anyone. It is just great storytelling of a unique and captivating tale.
4. PAROMJIT reviews for The Great Alone
This is my first read by Kristin Hannah and I adored it. Set in the 1970s, it is about Ernt Allbright, a man who returns home to Seattle after being a POW in the Vietnam War. He is now a changed man, suffering sleepless nights, flashbacks, nightmares and volatile in his behaviour. PTSD was an undiagnosed condition at the time but it ravaged Ernt’s life and that of his wife, Cora, and his 13 year old daughter, Leni. The Allbright family used to have good times, but now Leni hears the fights and conflict between her parents. Ernt struggles to hold down a job and their moves makes Leni long for a sense of stability. When Ernt inherits a cabin and land in Alaska from a dead soldier, he pleads with Cora that this will be the making of him and them, they could live off the land and be free of the pressures that they have been living under. Driven by this hope, they sell up and buy a rickety old VW van and set off for their adventure in The Great Alone, having little idea as to what awaits them and just how ill prepared they are for it. Alaska takes no prisoners, it has a majestic, harsh, awe inspiring beauty but its wilderness and wildlife is a cruel and unforgiving testing ground for those who make their home there.
The Allbrights arrive in remote Kaneq, Alaska, shocked by the state of the tiny dilapidated cabin and taken aback by all that needs doing and facing a desperately steep learning curve. Without the small community rallying together to help the family they would not survive the bitter, brutal Alaskan winter and the hardships that are to follow. They stock up on supplies, working the land in preparation. However, Ernt’s condition worsens, exacerbated by alcohol. He takes out his rage and temper on Cora and the tiny home becomes a place of darkness and domestic violence. Leni learns to read the signs and triggers that foretell when Ernt is going to lose it and you cannot help but feel for her and Cora. Mother and daughter have a close relationship giving them the emotional strength to endure the unbearable. Leni finds solace in books, something I completely understand and relate to. She forms her first friendship with Matthew and begins to grow roots in the community. The community prove to be an invaluable support to Cora and Leni such as the inimitable and capable Marge and Tom Walker. The angry Earl rails against the injustices of life, politics and institutions, grieving over the loss of his son. As the years go by, Leni is changed and shaped by the tragedies and hearbreak she faces,
Kristin Hannah has written a beautifully detailed and emotionally affecting novel that is both compelling and gripping. She captures the twin threats posed the Alaskan environment and the home ripped asunder by the dangerous Ernt. Hannah’s greatest achievement though is the characters she creates and the in depth development that takes place. This is Leni’s story, the burdens she grows up with, her emotional bond with her mother, and her search for identity and roots. Its a a tale of love and hope despite the battering that life can give. It is remarkably instructive on the cost, consequences and damage of war on families and the suffering that ensues. A brilliant read that I will not forget and recommend highly. Many thanks to St Martin’s Press for an ARC.
5. HEATHER ANDRONOVICH reviews for The Great Alone
Tragic, yet beautiful!
Such a beautifully written, yet tragic novel that deals with so many hard issues- and that is what makes this book so good. Please be aware before you read this that there is a lot of talk of domestic abuse in this book.
The Great Alone follows from Leni’s POV as her family (Leni, Mom and Dad) picks up their life in Seattle and moves to off the grid Alaska following her dad’s return from being a POW in the Vietnam War. however, none of them were prepared for what was to come living in the middle of nowhere Alaska, especially when winter hits.
Leni’s perseverance in this book is unmatched- she went through so much as a child and into her adulthood, and she just kept pushing on. The way that her and Matthew were able to open up to one another and rely on each other’s friendship to get through some of their hardest times really emphasizes the theme of love in this book (and that love is shown in different ways by different people, but not always shown in the relationships in this book). The side characters were also really well developed and guided the story along.
Some people felt the ending was really rushed, and while I kind of agree, I also think that’s representative of life and how sometimes you just can’t catch a break. But I do understand it from both sides.
Overall, this book was heartbreaking to read at times, but held such a beautiful message and was written so well. Highly recommend!
6. J.F. reviews for The Great Alone
Beautiful writing but dark cloud hangs over it
This is the first time I have read this author. The fact that the story takes place in Alaska immediately grabbed my attention as I am intrigued by that place. And while much of the story takes place there I found that this story is more about relations than a place. And the relations weren’t always good (trying to avoid a spoiler here). With a ‘any time the shoe will drop’ presence darkness seem to permeate the story even though relational triumphs were presented as well. There was constant tension in the story which is generally what one wants in a good read. That did keep me flipping the pages. But in the end, despite the author’s amazing attention to detail & her ability to write almost in a poetic fashion at times, I was exhausted by the characters. This author is very talented & I will read another work from her but I sure hope it will be on the lighter side of things.
7. PHYLLISANNE reviews for The Great Alone
Another great read!
Her books are not only great reading but I learn so much about certain era’s and in this case, living in places like Alaska. I’m fascinated with the 18 hours of day or night during certain months. It doesn’t take long to realize that this book is focused on the daughter. The abuse her mother suffered from her Dad was hidden in Seattle but very visible in Alaska. He had post war issues and she was blinded by her love for him and put up with it because she felt he was broken from the war. There are a lot of twists and turns and the characters are well developed. I enjoyed this book as well as the four winds and the women. I have 2 more of her books coming this week. They are all so different in story line and time periods which makes it interesting. I don’t really like sequel books all the time. I want different reads. Enjoy!
8. DIANE S reviews for The Great Alone
Book coincidences. I always read multiple books at the same time, always have. So, I was reading History of Wolves, and because I had paper Arcs of both books and wanted to pass them on, I also started this one. Both deal with the trauma of war, but this one was set in Alaska, and I love books set in cold climates. It is the seventies and Ernt, who came back much changed from Vietnam, can’t seem to settle. Moving his small family from place to place, until he is left a small cabin in Alaska, from a buddy who served with him. So off they go, very unprepared for the hardness and danger that Alaska presents. Cora, who loves and will do anything for her husband and their young teenage daughter, Leni.
Some fabulous characters, fantastic setting, and some extremely challenging issues. I never felt sorry for Ernt, despite what he went through, he was not a very nice man. That is an understatement, spousal abuse to me is inexcusable, the effects on a young Leni, just terrible. There are many people they meet in Alaska that were loving and helpful, Leni starts a relationship and then tragedy strikes again. This story really pulled me in, couldn’t look away, and yes the ending may be a bit treacly but let’s just say some of these characters deserved some happiness. Enjoyed watching and learning as they learned to survive in Alaska, made friends and found stolen moments of joy.
Yes, this made me teary up more than once, and I have to say everyone could use a guardian angel like Large Marge.
ARC from publisher.
9. LINDA reviews for The Great Alone
Like a curved, upturned palm, Alaska beckons with her beauty, her majesty, and her prolific grandeur.
The awe-inspiring allure gestures first until the ruggedness of her backbone sets in.
The Allbright family lives on the edge of a nomad’s existence. Seattle, once filled with promise, no longer does. It’s 1974 and these displaced individuals are the walking wounded. Ernt bears the mental and physical scars of being a prisoner of war held in Vietnam. The nightmares are no longer wrapped in the darkness. They seep into the day and explode without warning. Cora, his wife, flits back and forth with her feeble attempts to sidestep his abusive behavior. And caught in the throws of this disfunction is thirteen year old Leni. Her silence lays a mantle over the brokenness.
Ernt receives a letter from the father of his best friend who was killed in Vietnam. Earl Harlan tells Ernt that Bo left a sizable plot of land and a cabin to him in Kaneq, Alaska. It’s his for the taking. Ernt whoops with joy and begins to sell everything they have for a beat-up VW bus in order to make the journey. Cora sees the face of the love she long remembered from before the war. Perhaps this is the new beginning that they are so desperate for. And Leni just yearns for a place of permanence for once in her young life.
With hardly a plan or adequate preparation, the Allbrights find themselves in the jaw-dropping majesty of the Alaskan wilderness. With the help of Mad Earl’s family and the resourceful Marge Birdsall, also known as Large Marge, the Allbrights cut into the land and start to dig in. Like the famous line from Game of Thrones: “Winter is coming.” Tremendous effort must be put forth in order to exist through the brutality of an Alaskan winter.
“Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next.”
Filled with grizzly bear, caribou, wolves, and enormous moose, danger is around every turn. But our story brushes against more than Nature……human nature to be exact. Ernt begins to resent his new neighbors as the darkness within him takes hold once again. And once again, Cora invents excuses for Ernt’s behavior until she begins to believe it all herself. She and Leni hardly breathe in the confines of that tiny cabin.
Kristin Hannah creates a storyline that lays bare the tragedies of war, broken families, unfulfilled dreams, and the explosive side of a dormant wound. Her characterizations are remarkable as life unravels from 1974 to 1986. We will experience the dramatic changes that take place within Leni as she shields herself from the rages that exist within as well as those from the treacherous land itself. Kristin Hannah writes from a source of profound respect for the individuals who ramble down the uneven terrain of life. Her words will invoke a gamut of feelings within you as you leave your own footprints behind. A remarkable read, indeed, and so worthy of your attention.
I received a copy of The Great Alone through NetGalley for an honest review. My thanks to St. Martin’s Press and to Kristin Hannah for the opportunity.
10. CANADIAN JEN reviews for The Great Alone
I think Kristen Hannah is like a fine wine. With each new novel, she gets better and better.
Thirteen year old Leni and her parents move to the Alaskan wilderness as a possible solution to her dad’s illness. He suffers from PTSD having returned from Vietnam broken, with an extreme vision and little survival skills.
Once the harshness of winter sets in, the human spirit is tested in a family whose relationship is already in a delicate balance; the lack of daylight brings with it the challenges of isolation and survival. The darkness envelopes them and tempers are shorter. Abuse becomes the weapon of choice for her father to battle the inner demons that visit him almost daily.
The sacrifices both her and her mother make as a means of survival come at a high cost. Even love is a threat in this environment. The wildness of Alaska will either break them or strengthen who they are and who they will come to be.
This is Hannah’s crown jewel. 5⭐️
III. The Great Alone Quotes
The best book quotes from The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah
“In real life, she saw, it wasn’t like that. It was sadness opening up inside of you, changing how you saw the world.”
“The Great Alone,” Leni said. That was what Robert Service called Alaska.
“Books are the mile markers of my life. Some people have family photos or home movies to record their past. I’ve got books. Characters. For as long as I can remember, books have been my safe place.”
“A thing can be true and not the truth,”
“A girl was like a kite; without her mother’s strong, steady hold on the string, she might just float away, be lost somewhere among the clouds.”
“You know what they say about finding a man in Alaska—the odds are good, but the goods are odd.”
“How will I stop loving him, Mama? Will I …. forget ?
Mama sighed.
Ah. That. Love doesn’t fade or die, baby girl. People tell you it does, but it doesn’t. If you love him now, you’ll love him in ten years and in forty. Differently, maybe , a faded version, but he’s part of you now. And you are part of him.”“Love and fear. The most destructive forces on earth. Fear had turned her inside out, love had made her stupid.”
“… home was not just a cabin in a deep woods that overlooked a placid cove. Home was a state of mind, the peace that came from being who you were and living an honest life.”
“In the silence, Leni wondered if one person could ever really save another, or if it was the kind of thing you had to do for yourself.”
“You have a child, so you know. You are my heart, baby girl. You are everything I did right. And I want you to know I would do it all again, every wonderful terrible second of it. I would do years and years of it again for one minute with you.”
“Leni had never known anyone who had died before. She had seen death on television and read about it in her beloved books, but now she saw the truth of it. In literature, death was many things – a message, catharsis, retribution. There were deaths that came from a beating heart that stopped and deaths of another kind, a choice made, like Frodo going to the Grey Havens. Death made you cry, filled you with sadness, but in the best of her books, there was peace, too, satisfaction, a sense of the story ending as it should.
In real life, she saw, it wasn’t like that. It was sadness opening up inside of you, changing how you saw the world.”“All this time, Dad had taught Leni how dangerous the outside world was. The truth was that the biggest danger of all was in her own home.”
“Alaska isn’t about who you were when you headed this way. It’s about who you become.”
“It’s scary that people can just stop loving you, you know?”
“You don’t stop loving a person when they’re hurt. You get stronger so they can lean on you.”
“He taught her something new about friendship: it picked right back up where you’d left off, as if you hadn’t been apart at all.”
“I think you stand by the people you love.”
“life—and the law—is hard on women. Sometimes doing the right thing is no help at all.”
“like all fairy tales, theirs was filled with thickets and dark places and broken dreams, and runaway girls.”
“Leni saw suddenly how hope could break you, how it was a shiny lure for the unwary. What happened to you if you hoped too hard for the best and got the worst?”
“Instinctively, she lifted her camera and minimized her view of the world. It was how she managed her memories, how she processed the world. In pictures. With a camera, she could crop and reframe her life.”
“Like all motherless girls, Leni would become an emotional explorer, trying to uncover the lost part of her, the mother who carried and nurtured and loved her. Leni would become both mother and child; to her, mama would still grow and age. She would never be gone, not as long as Leni remembered her.”
“Books are the mile markers of my life. Some people have family photos or home movies to record their past. I’ve got books. Characters. For as long as I can remember, books have been my safe place. I read about places I can barely imagine and lose myself in journeys to foreign lands to save girls who didn’t know they were really princesses.”
“She knew what nightmares could do to a person and how bad memories could change who you were.”
“And the books! She’d never seen so many. They whispered to her of unexplored worlds and unmet friends and she realized that she wasn’t alone in this new world. Her friends were here, spine out, waiting for her as they always had.”
“Did adults just look at the world and see what they wanted to see, think what they wanted to think? Did evidence and experience mean nothing?”
“Now she knew there were a hundred ways to be lost and even more ways to be found.”
“They were trapped, by environment and finances, but mostly by the sick, twisted love that bound her parents together.”
“She saw how love could be dangerous and beyond control. Ravenous.”
“She knew the difference between fact and fiction, but she couldn’t abandon her love stories.”
“Alaska didn’t create character; it revealed it.”
“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.”
“Fear, Leni learned, was not the small dark closet she’d always imagined; walls pressed in close, a ceiling you bumped your head on, a floor cold to the touch.
No.
Fear was a mansion, one room after another, connected by endless hallways.”“All at once, it seemed, the leaves of cottonwood trees around the cabin turned golden and whispered to themselves, then curled into black flutes and floated to the ground in crispy, lacy heaps.”
“The glass can be half empty or half full.” Leni knew the glass was broken.”
“Leni felt distance spreading between them. That was how change came, she supposed: in the quiet of things unspoken and truths unacknowledged.”
Excerpted from The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah
Chapter 1
That spring, rain fell in great sweeping gusts that rattled the rooftops. Water found its way into the smallest cracks and undermined the sturdiest foundations. Chunks of land that had been steady for generations fell like slag heaps on the roads below, taking houses and cars and swimming pools down with them. Trees fell over, crashed into power lines; electricity was lost. Rivers flooded their banks, washed across yards, ruined homes. People who loved each other snapped and fights erupted as the water rose and the rain continued.
Leni felt edgy, too. She was the new girl at school, just a face in the crowd; a girl with long hair, parted in the middle, who had no friends and walked to school alone.
Now she sat on her bed, with her skinny legs drawn up to her flat chest, a dog-eared paperback copy of Watership Down open beside her. Through the thin walls of the rambler, she heard her mother say, Ernt, baby, please don’t. Listen … and her father’s angry leave me the hell alone.
They were at it again. Arguing. Shouting.
Soon there would be crying.
Weather like this brought out the darkness in her father.
Leni glanced at the clock by her bed. If she didn’t leave right now, she was going to be late for school, and the only thing worse than being the new girl in junior high was drawing attention to yourself. She had learned this fact the hard way; in the last four years, she’d gone to five schools. Not once had she found a way to truly fit in, but she remained stubbornly hopeful. She took a deep breath, unfolded, and slid off the twin bed. Moving cautiously through her bare room, she went down the hall, paused at the kitchen doorway.
“Damn it, Cora,” Dad said. “You know how hard it is on me.”
Mama took a step toward him, reached out. “You need help, baby. It’s not your fault. The nightmares —”
Leni cleared her throat to get their attention. “Hey,” she said.
Dad saw her and took a step back from Mama. Leni saw how tired he looked, how defeated.
“I — I have to go to school,” Leni said.
Mama reached into the breast pocket of her pink waitress uniform and pulled out her cigarettes. She looked tired; she’d worked the late shift last night and had the lunch shift today. “You go on, Leni. You don’t want to be late.” Her voice was calm and soft, as delicate as she was.
Leni was afraid to stay and afraid to leave. It was strange — stupid, even — but she often felt like the only adult in her family, as if she were the ballast that kept the creaky Allbright boat on an even keel. Mama was engaged in a continual quest to “find” herself. In the past few years, she’d tried EST and the human potential movement, spiritual training, Unitarianism. Even Buddhism. She’d cycled through them all, cherry-picked pieces and bits. Mostly, Leni thought, Mama had come away with T-shirts and sayings. Things like, What is, is, and what isn’t, isn’t. None of it seemed to amount to much.
“Go,” Dad said.
Leni grabbed her backpack from the chair by the kitchen table and headed for the front door. As it slammed shut behind her, she heard them start up again.
Damn it, Cora —
Please, Ernt, just listen —
It hadn’t always been this way. At least that’s what Mama said. Before the war, they’d been happy, back when they’d lived in a trailer park in Kent and Dad had had a good job as a mechanic and Mama had laughed all of the time and danced to “Piece of My Heart” while she made dinner. (Mama dancing was really all Leni remembered about those years.)
Then Dad went off to Vietnam and got shot down and captured. Without him, Mama fell apart; that was when Leni first understood her mother’s fragility. They drifted for a while, she and Mama, moved from job to job and town to town until they finally found a home in a commune in Oregon. There, they tended beehives and made lavender sachets to sell at the farmers’ market and protested the war. Mama changed her personality just enough to fit in.
When Dad had finally come home, Leni barely recognized him. The handsome, laughing man of her memory had become moody, quick to anger, and distant. He hated everything about the commune, it seemed, and so they moved. Then they moved again. And again. Nothing ever worked out the way he wanted.
He couldn’t sleep and couldn’t keep a job, even though Mama swore he was the best mechanic ever.
That was what he and Mama were fighting about this morning: Dad getting fired again.
Leni flipped up her hood. On her way to school, she walked through blocks of well-tended homes, bypassed a dark woods (stay away from there), passed the A&W where the high school kids hung out on weekends, and a gas station, where a line of cars waited to fill up for fifty-five cents a gallon. That was something everyone was angry about these days — gas prices.
As far as Leni could tell, adults were edgy in general, and no wonder. The war in Vietnam had divided the country. Newspapers blared bad news daily: bombings by Weatherman or the IRA; planes being hijacked; the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. The massacre at the Munich Olympics had stunned the whole world, as had the Watergate scandal. And recently, college girls in Washington State had begun to disappear without a trace. It was a dangerous world.
She would give anything for a real friend right now. It was all she really wanted: someone to talk to.
On the other hand, it didn’t help to talk about her worries. What was the point of confession?
Sure, Dad lost his temper sometimes and he yelled and they never had enough money and they moved all the time to distance themselves from creditors, but that was their way, and they loved each other.
But sometimes, especially on days like today, Leni was afraid. It felt to her as if her family stood poised on the edge of a great precipice that could collapse at any second, crumble away like the houses that crashed down Seattle’s unstable, waterlogged hillsides.
* * *
After school, Leni walked home in the rain, alone.
Her house sat in the middle of a cul-de-sac, on a yard less tended than the rest: a bark-brown rambler with empty flower boxes and clogged gutters and a garage door that didn’t close. Weeds grew in clumps from the decaying gray roof shingles. An empty flagpole pointed accusingly upward, a statement about her father’s hatred of where this country was headed. For a man whom Mama called a patriot, he sure hated his government.
She saw Dad in the garage, sitting on a slanted workbench beside Mama’s dented-up Mustang with the duct-taped top. Cardboard boxes lined the interior walls, full of stuff they hadn’t yet unpacked from the last move.
He was dressed — as usual — in his frayed military jacket and torn Levi’s. He sat slouched forward, his elbows resting on his thighs. His long black hair was a tangled mess and his mustache needed trimming. His dirty feet were bare. Even slumped over and tired-looking, he was movie-star handsome. Everyone thought so.
He cocked his head, peered at her through his hair. The smile he gave her was a little worn around the edges, but it still lit up his face. That was the thing about her dad: he might be moody and sharp-tempered, even a little scary sometimes, but that was just because he felt things like love and loss and disappointment so keenly. Love most of all. “Lenora,” he said in that scratchy, cigarette-smoker voice of his. “I was waiting for you. I’m sorry. I lost my temper. And my job. You must be disappointed as hell in me.”
“No, Dad.”
She knew how sorry he was. She could see it on his face. When she was younger, she’d sometimes wondered what good all those sorries were if nothing ever changed, but Mama had explained it to her. The war and captivity had snapped something in him. It’s like his back is broken, Mama had said, and you don’t stop loving a person when they’re hurt. You get stronger so they can lean on you. He needs me. Us.
Leni sat down beside him. He put an arm around her, pulled her in close. “The world is being run by lunatics. It’s not my America anymore. I want …” He didn’t finish, and Leni didn’t say anything. She was used to her dad’s sadness, his frustration. He stopped sentences halfway through all the time, as if he were afraid of giving voice to scary or depressing thoughts. Leni knew about that reticence and understood it; lots of times it was better to stay silent.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a mostly crushed pack of cigarettes. He lit one up and she drew in the acrid, familiar scent.
She knew how much pain he was in. Sometimes she woke up to her dad crying and her mama trying to soothe him, saying stuff like, Shhh, now, Ernt, it’s over now, you’re home safe.
He shook his head, exhaled a stream of blue-gray smoke. “I just want … more, I guess. Not a job. A life. I want to walk down the street and not have to worry about being called a baby-killer. I want …” He sighed. Smiled. “Don’t worry. It’ll all be okay. We’ll be okay.”
“You’ll get another job, Dad,” she said.
“Sure I will, Red. Tomorrow will be better.”
That was what her parents always said.
* * *
On a cold, bleak morning in mid-April, Leni got up early and staked out her place on the ratty floral sofa in the living room and turned on the Today show. She adjusted the rabbit ears to get a decent picture. When it popped into focus, Barbara Walters was saying ” … Patricia Hearst, now calling herself Tania, seen here in this photograph holding an M1 carbine at the recent bank robbery in San Francisco. Eyewitnesses report that the nineteen-year-old heiress, who was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in February …”
Leni was spellbound. She still couldn’t believe that an army could march in and take a teenager from her apartment. How could anyone be safe anywhere in a world like that? And how did a rich teenager become a revolutionary named Tania?
“Come on, Leni,” Mama said from the kitchen. “Get ready for school.”
The front door banged open.
Dad came into the house, smiling in a way that made it impossible not to smile back. He looked out of scale, larger than life in the low-ceilinged kitchen, vibrant against the water-marked gray walls. Water dripped from his hair.
Mama stood at the stove, frying bacon for breakfast.
Dad swept into the kitchen and cranked up the transistor radio that sat on the Formica counter. A scratchy rock ‘n’ roll song came through. Dad laughed and pulled Mama into his arms.
Leni heard his whispered “I’m sorry. Forgive me.”
“Always,” Mama said, holding him as if she were afraid he’d push her away.
Dad kept his arm around Mama’s waist and pulled her over to the kitchen table. He pulled out a chair, said, “Leni, come in here!” Leni loved it when they included her. She left her spot on the sofa and took a seat beside her mother. Dad smiled down at Leni and handed her a paperback book. The Call of the Wild. “You’ll love this, Red.”
He sat down across from Mama, scooted in close to the table. He waswearing what Leni thought of as his Big Idea smile. She’d seen it before, whenever he had a plan to change their lives. And he’d had a lot of plans: Selling everything and camping for a year as they drove the Big Sur highway. Raising mink (what a horror that had been). Selling American Seed packets in Central California.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a folded-up piece of paper, slapped it triumphantly on the table. “You remember my friend Bo Harlan?” Mama took a moment to answer. “From ‘Nam?” Dad nodded. To Leni, he said, “Bo Harlan was the crew chief and I was the door gunner. We looked out for each other. We were together when our bird went down and we got captured. We went through hell together.”
Leni noticed how he was shaking. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, so she could see the burn scars that ran from his wrist to his elbow in ridges of puckered, disfigured skin that never tanned. Leni didn’t know what had caused his scars — he never said and she never asked — but his captors had done it. She had figured out that much. The scars covered his back, too, pulled the skin into swirls and puckers.
“They made me watch him die,” he said.
Leni looked worriedly at Mama. Dad had never said this before. To hear the words now unsettled them.
He tapped his foot on the floor, played a beat on the table with fast-moving fingers. He unfolded the letter, smoothed it out, and turned it so they could read the words.
Sergeant Allbright —
You are a hard man to find. I am Earl Harlan.
My son, Bo, wrote many letters home about his friendship with you. I thank you for that.
In his last letter, he told me that if anything happened to him in that piece of shit place, he wanted you to have his land up here in Alaska.
It isn’t much. Forty acres with a cabin that needs fixing. But 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.
I don’t have no phone, but you can write me c/o the Homer Post Office. I’ll get the letter sooner or later.
The land is at the end of the road, past the silver gate with a cow skull and just before the burnt tree, at mile marker 13.
Thanks again,
Earl
Mama looked up. She cocked her head, gave a little birdlike tilt as she studied Dad. “This man … Bo, has given us a house? A house?” “Think of it,” Dad said, lifted out of his seat by enthusiasm. “A house that’s ours. That we own. In a place where we can be self-sufficient, grow our vegetables, hunt our meat, and be free. We’ve dreamed of it for years, Cora. Living a simpler life away from all the bullshit down here. We could be free. Think of it.”
“Wait,” Leni said. Even for Dad, this was big. “Alaska? You want to move again? We just moved here.”
Mama frowned. “But … there’s nothing up there, is there? Just bears and Eskimos.”
He pulled Mama to her feet with an eagerness that made her stumble, fall into him. Leni saw the desperate edge of his enthusiasm. “I need this, Cora. I need a place where I can breathe again. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to crawl out of my skin. Up there, the flashbacks and shit will stop. I know it. We need this. We can go back to the way things were before ‘Nam screwed me up.”
Mama lifted her face to Dad’s, her pallor a sharp contrast to his dark hair and tanned skin.
“Come on, baby,” Dad said. “Imagine it …”
Leni saw Mama softening, reshaping her needs to match his, imagining this new personality: Alaskan. Maybe she thought it was like EST or yoga or Buddhism. The answer. Where or when or what didn’t matter to Mama. All she cared about was him. “Our own house,” she said. “But … money … you could apply for that military disability —”
“Not that discussion again,” he said with a sigh. “I’m not doing that. Achange is all I need. And I’ll be more careful with money from now on, Cora. I swear. I still have a little of the bread I inherited from the old man. And I’ll cut back on drinking. I’ll go to that veterans’ support-group thing you want me to.”
Leni had seen all of this before. 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.
Chapter 2
The next morning, Leni lay in her bed, listening to rain patter the roof, imagining the emergence of mushrooms beneath her window, their bulbous, poisonous tops pushing up through the mud, glistening temptingly. She had lain awake long past midnight, reading about the vast landscape of Alaska. It had captivated her in an unexpected way. The last frontier was like her dad, it seemed. Larger than life. Expansive. A little dangerous.
She heard music — a tinny, transistor melody. “Hooked on a Feeling.” She threw back the covers and got out of bed. In the kitchen, she found her mother standing in front of the stove, smoking a cigarette. She looked ethereal in the lamplight, her shag-cut blond hair still messy from sleep, her face veiled in blue-gray smoke. She was wearing a white tank top that had been washed so often it hung on her slim body, and a pair of hotpink panties with a sagging elastic waist. A small purple bruise at the base of her throat was strangely beautiful, a starburst almost, highlighting the delicateness of her features.
“You should be sleeping,” Mama said. “It’s early.”
Leni came up beside her mother, rested her head on her shoulder. Mama’s skin smelled of rose perfume and cigarettes. “We don’t sleep,” Leni said.
….
Note: Above are quotes and excerpts from the book “The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah”. If you find it interesting and useful, don’t forget to buy paper books to support the Author and Publisher!
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