She's selected a magnificent canvas for her word paintings and makes full use of the beauty that spawned several cable television series about Alaskan homesteaders.
The Great Alone is a striking example of a story that couldn't have unfolded anywhere except the place Hannah chose for it. The small supporting cast of two-fisted neighbors, with names like Large Marge and Mad Earl, backfill nicely with colorful characters. Most of the story is told through Leni's wondrously elemental child's point of view, and it's hard not to form a bond with her. The Great Alone is full of rich and varied characterizations. How Cora and Leni deal with the tragic consequences of Cora's decision to follow Ernt to Alaska marries beautiful writing with a clever plot and an unexpectedly uplifting climax. This story sinks its hooks deep into the reader, and you'll no more be able to leave it than Hannah's characters can run from the troubled Ernt. You'll want to pull your eyes away from her razor cut description of domestic violence and skip ahead. With a history of violence, he turns on his wife and eventually his daughter in a series of increasingly brutal episodes that Hannah's vivid writing makes painful to read. When former Vietnam POW Ernt Allbright inherits a cabin in remote Kaneq, Alaska from an Army buddy, he moves wife Cora and daughter Leni to a place where he hopes he "can breathe again." Breathing is the least of Ernt's problems as the deep indigo of the Alaskan winter fills every corner of their lives and cabin fever drives the last bit of self-control out of Ernt.
The Great Alone is also part Alaska: The Last Frontier and part The Shining.
The latest of Hannah's 16 works, it's already optioned for film, and, in the hands of the right cast and director, should be one you'll want to see.
Kristin Hannah's best-selling coming-of-age novel The Great Alone is so much more than that - an intimately woven tapestry covering parts of two intense decades in the life of Leni Allbright, a girl transplanted to northern Alaska as a teen by her PTSD-scarred father.
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