The Great Alone: A Novel
✒️ Author: Kristin Hannah |. 📖 Published: 2018 | 🗓 Read: July 13, 2020 | 📄 Pages: 450
Summary
Alaska, 1974. Unpredictable. Unforgiving. Untamed. For a family in crisis, the ultimate test of survival.
Ernt Allbright, a former POW, comes home from the Vietnam war a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes an impulsive decision: he will move his family north, to Alaska, where they will live off the grid in America’s last true frontier.
Thirteen-year-old Leni, a girl coming of age in a tumultuous time, caught in the riptide of her parents’ passionate, stormy relationship, dares to hope that a new land will lead to a better future for her family. She is desperate for a place to belong. Her mother, Cora, will do anything and go anywhere for the man she loves, even if it means following him into the unknown
Why You Should Read It
It’s a rollercoaster of a read in all the right ways.
Notable Highlights
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.
---
You know what they say about finding a man in Alaska—the odds are good, but the goods are odd.”
---
Up here, there’s no one to tell you what to do or how to do it. We each survive our own way. If you’re tough enough, it’s heaven on earth.”
---
“Everyone has a story. Maybe yours just starts up here.”
---
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.
---
“The Great Alone,” Leni said. That was what Robert Service called Alaska.
---
“A thing can be true and not the truth, now shush. We don’t want to make him mad.”
Notes: 1) True but not the truth.
---
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.
Notes: 1) Death
---
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.
Notes: 1) Like the description
---
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.
---