The Great Alone: A Novel

I have loved every Kristin Hannah book I have read so far but this one really gripped my heart and brought up so many emotions. Beautiful writing Amazing characters. Most definitely a must read!

I first caught glimpses of Kristin Hannah in the televised version of Firefly Lane and then more deeply in The Nightingale, which a friend recommended to me. In that book I was impressed with the depth of both the plot and the characters that Hannah creates. I also loved the historical fiction setting. This year my wife and I vacationed to Alaska on a cruise, and even that short experience allowed the state to get its hooks in me. Then a coworker recommended The Great Alone. I will admit I was not hooked in the first chapter and wondered if I’d care much for the book. But, once the Albrights got to the last frontier, I could barely put the book down! I had to know what would happen next, what mistake someone might make or worse, what second mistake they would make. I have been blessed to come from a world foreign to Cora & Leni’s, but know women who have dealt with internal struggles. Hannah does a wonderful job of weaving this story into a world where most people think only of the outside dangers in the Alaskan wilderness. So many emotions, even tears throughout. I enjoyed the entire complexity and completeness of the story for Leni. The book could’ve ended many times, but Hannah brought complete closure to the story, both for Leni and her mom. I will definitely be reading more from Kristin Hannah!

This is the latest addition to my collection of books by Kristin Hannah. I love her writing-the story lines, her characters and the development of stories and people in her books. This one is really good. I am half way through. Hey books are hard to put down, so I usually read one of her novels in a weekend. Any kind of weather, I can curl up in a comfy spot with a hot or cold beverage and read for hours. Great escape for me. I am so blessed to have been raised to be an avid reader. If you haven’t discovered Hannah’s books I highly recommend them. You can even find them at reasonable used prices on Amazon.

I was captivated from this novel from the beginning. So many factors are involved: Broken people with broken souls; family abuse; a sad portrait of a woman who tolerates abuse; the effects of abuse on a child; the tragedy of a Viet Nam Vet's post-war mental breakdown of his once good soul. For me, however, the most poignant and educational factors were the descriptions of a wild, desolate, beautiful Alaska in the 1970's. And the stories behind the characters involved who lived there - and played vital roles to the main characters. The tension is palpable. The story is mesmerizing, soulful, heartbreaking, suspenseful. It's one of those rare novels that had me breaking my rule of reading only at bedtime...I had to find out 'what's happening next?". If the following passages do not whet the appetite, I don't know what will: "Two kinds of folks come up to Alaska, Cora. People running to something and people running away 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 here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you." "Even her laugh seemed at home here, an echo of the bells that tinkled from wind chimes in front of the shops." "Leni stared down at the sea, rolling inexorably toward her. Nothing you did could hold back that rising tide. One mistake or miscalculation and you could be stranded or washed away. All you could do was protect yourself by reading the charts and being prepared and making smart choices." "She was sweating hard, scooping a bucket of water from the creek, slopping it across her boots, when night fell. And she meant FELL; it hit hard and fast, like a lid clanging down on its pot." "Dad's intentions were good, but even so, it was like living with a wild animal. Like those crazy hippies the Alaskans talked about who lived with wolves and bears and invariably ended up getting killed. The natural-born predator could seem domesticated, even friendly, could lick your throat affectionately or rub up against you to get a back scratch. But you knew, or should know, that it was a wild thing you lived with, that a collar and leash and a bowl of food might tame the actions of the beast, but couldn't change its essential nature. In a split second,, less time than it took to exhale a breath, that wolf could claim its nature and turn, fangs bared." "A girl was like a kite; without her mother's strong, steady hold on the string, she might just flat away, be lost somewhere among the clouds." "Fear and shame she understood. Fear made you run and hide and shame made you stay quiet, but this anger wanted something else. Release." "There it was: the sad truth. Mama loved him too much to leave him. Still, even now, with her face bruised and swollen. Maybe what she'd always said was true, maybe she couldn't breathe without him, maybe she'd wilt like a flower without the sunshine of his adoration." "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." "It made Leni feel as if she were a coil of rope drawn around a cleat with the wind pulling at it, tugging, the rope creaking in resistance, slipping. If the line wasn't perfectly tied down, it would all come undone, be torn away, maybe the wind would pull the cleat from its home in fury." "There were a lot of bumper stickers like that out here, deep in Alaska's wild interior, far from the tourist destinations of the coast or the majestic beauty of Denali. Alaska was full of fringe-ists. People who believed in weirdo things and prayed to exclusionary Gods and filled their basements with equal measures of guns and Bibles. If you wanted to live in a place where no one told you what to do and didn't care if you parked a trailer in your yard or had a fridge on your porch, Alaska was the state for you." "The farther away you got from civilization, the stranger things got. Most people spent one dark, bleak, eight-month winter in Fairbanks and left the state screaming. The few who stayed-misfits, adventurers, romantics, loners-rarely left again." "Sometimes you had to go backward in order to go forward." "He hadn't realized how time could unspool the years of your life until for a second you were fourteen again, crying from a place so deep it seemed to predate you, desperate to be whole again." "Time was not something she usually paid much attention to. On the homestead, the bigger picture mattered-the darkening of the sky, the ebbing of the tide, the snow hares changing color, the birds returning or flying south. That was how they marked the passage of time, in growing seasons and salmon runs, and the first snowfall." "After that and all the way home, he said nothing, which should have been better than yelling, but it wasn't. Yelling was like a bomb in the corner: you saw it, watched the fuse burn, and you knew when it would explode and you needed to run for cover. Not speaking was a killer somewhere in your house with a gun when you were sleeping." "Love and fear. The most destructive forces on earth. Fear had turned her inside out, love had made her stupid." "Five out of every thousand people went missing in Alaska every year, were lost. That was a known fact. They fell down crevasses, lost their way on trails, drowned in a rising tide. Alaska. The Great Alone." "Someone said to me once that Alaska didn't create character; it revealed it." "This state, this place, is like no other. It is beauty and horror; savior and destroyer. Here, where survival is a choice that must be made over and over, in the wildest place in America, on the edge of civilization, where water in all its forms can kill you, you learn who you are........You learn what you will do to survive. That lesson, that revelation, as my mother once told me about love, is Alaska's great and terrible gift. Those who come for beauty alone, or for some imaginary life, or those who seek safety, will fail. In the vast expanse of this unpredictable wilderness, you will either become your best self and flourish, or you will run away, screaming, from the dark and the cold and the hardship. There is no middle ground, no safe place; not here, in the Great Alone." The physical descriptions throughout the novel are ethereal...you can touch and feel and see what the author paints for you. I think the author did an exquisite job with this novel - my one-time journey through Alaska will never be forgotten.

Every once in a while, you find a book that doesn't just tell you a story—it pulls you in so deeply that you can almost feel the bite of the winter wind and the warmth of a flickering hearth. And your heart bursts open - what a book! Kristin Hannah has a way of making the Alaskan wilderness feel like a living, breathing character that challenges the soul. The Great Alone was that book for me. I was absolutely captivated from the very first page and found it impossible to put down. Kristin Hannah is, quite simply, a fabulous writer. She has this extraordinary gift for exploring the resilience of the human spirit and the complicated, beautiful bonds of family. Her prose is raw, honest, and so evocative that I felt I was living alongside Leni in the Alaskan wilderness, learning what it truly means to survive and to love. To me, reading is a conscious way to choose joy—even when a story is bittersweet—because it expands our empathy and connects us to the wilder parts of ourselves. If you are looking for your next great read, this is the book. It is a hauntingly beautiful reminder of the strength we find when we are pushed to our limits. A stunning masterpiece that I will be thinking about for a long time.

Ernt Allbright can’t run far enough to escape his demons. Going off-grid in Alaska, Ernt drags his wife, Cora, and his daughter, Leni, into a wilderness experience none of them are prepared for in an effort to start a new life. They must learn to garden, hunt, and gather as much food as possible to survive the long winter, guarding against bears, wolves, and other predators that would destroy their home. The townspeople donate livestock and helpfully train the small family in homesteading skills to improve their chances of holding on until spring. As time goes by, Leni finds new friendships even as her father alienates the townspeople. As the winter days shorten and daylight slips away, Ernt’s grip on his temper and sanity wanes and his family will pay the price. There’s a lot of love in The Great Alone: a mother’s love, a friend’s love, a family’s love, romantic love, and dysfunctional love. Some of the romances are rock-solid and life-affirming. One romance is love at its best: patient, enduring, and indelible. However, the dysfunctional love that binds Ernt and Cora intersperses abusive episodes with declarations of love, regret, and broken promises. The residents of Kaneq, Alaska, don’t understand why Leni’s mother doesn’t tell someone, doesn’t leave, doesn’t accept help, why she doesn’t stop loving her abusive husband. They don’t understand why Leni doesn’t leave her parents and escape to college. But I can relate. It takes years to grow past the fear of telling people that one of your parents is hurting the other or hurting you and your siblings. Hiding becomes ingrained. Your family closes its ranks and stands alone against the world. There’s a wall that must not be breached. Your family pretends that the bruises and broken bones are from accidents. It becomes normal to both love and fear your parent. I think Kristin Hannah beautifully captures the essence of that conflict and dichotomy. I couldn’t sleep last night, and The Great Alone caught my eye as I was perusing Kindle books and nomming on a Skor bar hoping to feel sleep sneaking up on me. So quickly was I caught by this book that half my Skor bar still remains stranded on my bureau, abandoned when I nabbed my tablet and snuck to my recliner without waking the significant other. The story was so enthralling that I devoured it in one extended sitting broken only by puppy potty breaks. The Great Alone is a chilling, emotionally wrenching roller coaster ride. Kristin Hannah has created characters that are believable and realistically populate her vision of a child caught between a parent she loves and cannot abandon and a parent who claims to love her. In the midst of becoming a warrior capable of surviving her family, Alaska, hard choices, and the tragedies that rock her world, Leni discovers the true families that love her. It’s hard to write about this book and not include spoilers, so I’ll stop here and just say that there is a lot of sorrow (ask my Kleenex box about it), growth, and even joy in The Great Alone. For all its pain, this tale is unforgettably uplifting. Highly recommended. Edited for TMI and again to add in love as an element, since my review overly emphasized the sadder elements of the storyline.

This was the first Kristin Hannah book I read and it was chosen for book club. A few friends said it was a slow read so I was fully prepared to have a hard time getting into it---but this wasn't the case! I found it easy to read and easy to get engaged in the story. A young girl and her parents move to the middle of no where Alaska in the 1970s. Knowing nothing about Alaska especially during this time period the author did a great job painting the picture of what things looked like. There was strong character development. The only thing I did not like is the author jumped a few years in the middle of the book that I feel like could of added to the development of the main character. I had always heard Kristin Hannah books would make you cry and this one did. This book had love, loss, triumph, and the power of relationships. Definitely a longer read than other books but I had time and was able to fully dive in.

Another amazing book that you can’t put down even when it’s 2 am! Such a great story and well said.

Loved the story and the progression of the charachters. How they grow and aim for survival in wild Alaska who is a character itself.

Incredible story deeply moving and profoundly told. Thank you Kristin for this captivating book, which deeply touched my heart. And thank you to my incredible daughter Lacey for sharing it with me

What a book. Kristin Hannah creates these extraordinary stories and this book is just brilliant. The story follows young Leni, whose parents move into the wilderness trying to find some kind of happiness. Her father came back from Vietnam broken, and her mother is trapped, in love and in the memory of who her husband used to be. Leni senses early on that she needs to escape this situation, but has no idea how, and she doesn't want to leave her mother behind either. Then Leni meets Matthew, a forbidden love grows, and fate strikes. Alaska is the quiet star here, the backdrop for all that happens. How harsh life is, how nature and the seasons dictate everything, all is written so vividly and so beautifully at the same time. An intense reading experience, best enjoyed when you actually have the time to let yourself fall into it.

Kristin Hannah grasps the hands of female readers and takes them on life’s journeys. Journeys that broaden their understanding of themselves, of the female essence of their experiences and introduces them to an understanding of what life means for women in an essentially male world.

A wonderful read! Loved every little thing about the book, starting with the plot, the writing style, the climax; all of it was just spot on. Character development was great too. All the emotions and experiences were described extremely well. A five star read for sure ❤️