April 25, 2024 | ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT | By Greta Patterson
As the weather gets warmer, and the days get longer, there’s nothing quite as satisfying as fueling your intellectual superiority complex by reading a big book on the quad, just for fun. While everyone else is playing Spikeball or doing homework, why not prove that you’re that much more advanced by sitting in the middle of Tava reading? (Bonus points if you find other intellectual elites to read around you to emphasize just how much more advanced you all are than everyone else.) With that being said, it really is a wonderful time of year to get back into reading as summer approaches and you want to spend more time outside.
Now, let’s get into the review. The book that stood out to me in this block was “The Great Alone” by Kristin Hannah. Hannah is perhaps one of the most well-known authors of our generation, with “The Nightingale” being a collective favorite. “The Great Alone” follows the Allbright family as they move to rural Alaska in the years following the Vietnam War. Leni, the daughter and only child, watches her father Ernst struggle to come to terms with his new reality as a prisoner of war struggling with PTSD. As winter descends on them, Leni and her mother, Cora, must adapt to reality in this harsh environment — both due to the weather and her father’s unpredictable temper. Something I found exceptionally interesting about this book was the use of time. When the book begins, Leni is a young teenager navigating this new community she has been forced to live in. By the end of the book, Leni has a child of her own and returns to Alaska as a grown woman. I love the way this book doesn’t restrict itself to a short period of time but rather allows the complex story to properly develop. Watching Leni go from a child to raising a child of her own worked very well.
Womanhood is often a key theme in Hannah’s books, and “The Great Alone” included this in a way that centered on community and the need for a support system. Leni and Cora are not alone in this new environment, but rather have countless women they can rely on who help them along the way.
Ernst’s character didn’t bring much depth, in my opinion. Many of his characteristics feel very stereotypical of a man who came back from Vietnam traumatized, and while there were moments when the nuances of this identity came through, it overall felt too generic.
Throughout this novel, I generally felt like Leni kept getting confronted with brutal situation after brutal situation, making the book tiring to read after a certain point. All you want is for Leni to catch a break but she never does. Leni’s relationship with a local boy named Matthew proves to be a pivotal point in the plot, but something about the dynamic felt odd in terms of how it all ended. The ending was generally happy, but Leni and Matthew’s story contained some struggles that I felt were easily solvable with basic communication. I suppose if every character in every book just communicated their feelings and problems, most books wouldn’t exist. Regardless, I thought their ending was different than anything I have read before, bringing a freshness to the typical, “and they lived happily ever after”.
Ultimately, I enjoyed “The Great Alone” as it was unlike any story I’ve read before. At times it was unsatisfying, but this is partially what kept me reading since no good book is going to be cut and dry. The moral of the story, if you’ve ever thought about running away from civilization to live in rural Alaska, maybe consider how much you value things like running water and fresh food before making any hasty decisions. Happy reading!