Review: The Great Alone

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a chilling, excellent book. The Nightingale, by the same author, has been recommended to me numerous times. While I haven't yet read that, I immediately appreciated Hannah's writing style and mastery of writing a complex book.

This story is about a girl whose father is a drifter. At loose ends after a traumatic experience in combat during the Vietman War, he moves their family of three every few years. This time, he learns that his best friend from the War has left him some land in rural Alaska, so the family moves there. At first, they struggle with basic survival, completely unprepared for how rugged and cold and remote their new home is.

Then the father falls in with a group of survivalists, and begins to alienate the family from the small number of townspeople in the village. While his wife and daughter retain a working relationship with certain members of the village (and the daughter enters adolescence, with all its complications), the father becomes increasingly erratic, violent, and separatist.

As the book reaches its climax, I could not stop reading. The characters were so well-written, the obstacles so seemingly immovable, and the resolution just heartbreaking. And at hundreds of pages, Hannah reserved an appropriate amount for a proper denouement, which not all authors do. Just lovely, all around.

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