The Great Alone
- Brand: Unbranded
Description
The Great Alone is a survival story, both about surviving in the unforgiving Alaskan wilderness and about growing up with an abusive and volatile father. Ernst is a deeply flawed man. He prefers the company of survivalist and doomsdayer Mad Earl to that of the cheerier and more optimistic people in town. Cora remembers the man he once was and clings to that memory.
We see from Leni’s perspective that Cora can be a bit of a flirt. Why do you think that was? What was she trying to get Ernt to prove to her? But then her dad comes home with his “Big Idea” smile. A friend who died in the war left him some property in Alaska. Her father is ecstatic. It’s a place where they can live a decent life…away from all of the madness. A simple life on land that they can live off…grow their own vegetables, hunt, and be free.Hopefully, these book club questions for The Great Alone will help to get the discussion going for your next book club meeting! The story is about a family that moves to Alaska in 1974. The father, Ernt Allbright, is a former POW that comes home from the Vietnam War a changed and volatile man. He makes the impulsive decision to move his family to Alaska where they will live off the grid in America’s last frontier. The mother, Cora, will do anything and go anywhere for Ernt, even if it means following him into the unknown. Their thirteen-year-old daughter Leni is caught in the riptide of her parents’ passionate and stormy relationship. But she hopes that the new land will lead to a better future for her family. Her new novel, The Women, about a young woman coming of age during the turbulent 1960's in America, who joins the Army Nurse Corps and serves in Vietnam will be published February 6th, 2024. 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. Did you hold Leni responsible in your mind for any of Matthew’s misfortune? Why or why not? How does Leni show her devotion in the end? Did you anticipate the kind of future that is set in motion for them at the close of the book?
Wait,” Leni said. Even for Dad, this was big. “Alaska? You want to move again? We just moved here.” Leni suddenly saw how hope could break you, how it was a shiny lure for the unwary. What happened to you if you hoped too hard for the best and got the worst? Was it better not to hope at all, to prepare?’ (p.121) In Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone, a desperate family seeks a new beginning in the near-isolated wilderness of Alaska only to find that their unpredictable environment is less threatening than the erratic behavior found in human nature.
Media Reviews
What did you think about Leni and how she adapted to the Alaskan wilderness? Do you think you have to be a certain person to thrive there? 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.
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. Then Dad went off to Vietnam and got shot down and captured. Without him, Mama fell apart; that was when Leni first understood her mother’s fragility. They drifted for a while, she and Mama, moved from job to job and town to town until they finally found a home in a commune in Oregon. There, they tended beehives and made lavender sachets to sell at the farmers’ market and protested the war. Mama changed her personality just enough to fit in.Apart from the middle that drags a little, my main caveat about this book is that it gets a little soap opera-y in a few parts. There’s a lot of Big Events that happen in the book that enhance the drama, but also start to feel like a crutch.
- Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
- EAN: 764486781913
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