But she’s how many of us would be strong: in fits and starts, undone by errors of judgment and misplaced trust. Leni is, by all marks, the strong woman here. Anticipated plot twists unravel unexpectedly.
Hannah has created an atmosphere of brooding paranoia and simmering violence that can set your heart racing. Their isolation keeps her from standing up to Ernt, yet she won’t abandon her mother.
Leni is devoted to Cora, but she’s now in love with Matthew and takes chances that endanger her. And surely, she does what she can.īut Hannah has created a complex and agonizingly relatable character. The literary drill would have Leni saving her family, by stealth and cunning, courage and pluck. Leni realizes where the odd bruises she’s seen for years on her mother came from. He mines a more paranoid vein in the survivalists’ perseverance. Ernt resents Matthew’s father for his success and ambition. Leni makes a friend in school, Matthew, from one of Alaska’s founding families.
He says Alaska will give him a place “where I can breathe again,” and so the family once again packs up and moves - moves back in time, actually, to a log cabin without electricity or plumbing, where you carry a gun to the outhouse when bears are active, where you smoke fish and eke vegetables from greenhouses and spend every waking minute of the four non-winter months preparing for the eight months of darkness and isolation.Īt first, such purpose reinvigorates Ernt as he bonds with the neighbors’ survivalist spirit. Her mother, the acquiescent Cora, is estranged from her rich parents, who objected to her marrying Ernt, a vibrantly free spirit before returning from Vietnam, where he was a POW. Leni is the teenage voice of Hannah’s latest novel, “The Great Alone.” In 1974, Leni and her parents move to Homer, Alaska, for a fresh start. You rooted for Isabelle, but you couldn’t imagine yourself in her position. It’s a great book about a strong woman - but almost too strong. In her bestselling 2015 novel “The Nightingale,” Kristin Hannah gave us Isabelle, who joins the French Resistance in World War II to lead downed airmen across treacherous mountains with pluck and courage. We know the literary drill: Unassuming woman facing insurmountable challenges rises to the occasion in an inspiring journey of courage and pluck.
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