The Great Alone

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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. It's 1974 and the world is bursting with music, movies and glamour...and Leni finds herself isolated and alone. Trapped with an increasingly violent father and surrounded by an unforgivingly harsh land.

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."Kristin Hannah is one of my favorite authors and I am always excited when a new book is going to be released. When I found out that her new book, “The Great Alone” was set in Alaska in 1974 (the year I was born); I was itching to get reading. I don’t have n o phone, but you can write me c/o the Homer Post Office. I’ll get the letter sooner or later. Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past. 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. Hopefully, these book club questions for The Great Alone will help to get the discussion going for your next book club meeting!

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!” The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah is a story set in the Alaskan wilderness. As referenced in the book, the title comes from a line from a poem by Robert Service (“The Shooting of Dan McGrew”) where he refers to the remote Alaskan lands as the “Great Alone”. I knew I’d read it sooner or later, since I’d heard so much about it, but it got pushed off for a while when I was reading The Snow Child (also about a family trying to make a life in Alaska). I’m always a little hesitant to jump into books with similar premises or similar settings. 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—” Leni goes to school on Monday. It's a tiny one-room schoolhouse with only six students. Tica Rhodes, a native, is the teacher. Leni is seated next to Matthew Walker, who is her age (13), and they get along well.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. Leni’s father, Ernt, suffers from PTSD after being imprisoned in Vietnam. He’s damaged and volatile, difficult to live with, but suffering deeply.