The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

The Great Alone follows the Allbright family as they leave their peripatetic lifestyle in the lower 48 and move up to Alaska in the mid 1970’s. Ernt’s stint in Vietnam and five years as a POW have left him broken and abusive. Cora just can’t quit him – “There was a poison in him, and I drank it up.” – but is fiercely protective of their teenage girl, Leni. The whole family is hoping for a fresh start in Alaska, and at first it delivers it to them. The first half of the book is an engaging tale of what many families must have gone through when searching for a different lifestyle up in “the Great Alone.” But Ernt’s demons soon catch up to him, and the reader has to spend the rest of the book waiting to see what will go wrong, and just how bad it will be. Leni is constantly foreshadowing what is sure to come (“winter is coming,” literally), and I truly dislike books like this, as why should I invest in the characters when I know that bad things are going to happen to them?

When the sh%t does hit the fan, it’s one devastating event after another, each one getting more and more unbelievable. This could have been a beautiful book about so many things, and there’s no question that Hannah knows how to write well, but instead it just feels like a setup for tragedy so that it can have a “literary” label slapped onto it.