Book Review of The Great Alone

Last updated on August 23, 2018

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

The Great Alone is a story of self-discovery by Kristin Hannah. We meet Leni at the age of 13, living with her mom and dad in Seattle. Their life is difficult, with a father who can’t keep a job and a mother who doesn’t work.

We learn early in the story that the father, Ernt, was a prisoner of war in the Vietnam War and that experience changed him. Leni writes “The war and captivity had snapped something in him. It’s like his back is broken, Mama had said, and you don’t stop loving a person when they’re hurt. You get stronger so they can lean on you“. This seems like a commendable stance until you learn how strong the mother, Cora, has to be, and how much she puts up with from her husband.

After another job lost, the family gets some good news. Ernt finds out that he has inherited a house in Alaska from a friend who had been a prisoner of war with him, and whom he had watched die. He tells the family that they will be moving to Alaska. Leni is apprehensive, because this is not the first time that her father has taken them off on a new adventure that will turn things around for them. None of his ideas has been effective.

After a visit to the bank, Cora finds out that her husband has emptied out their bank account. She swallows her pride and goes to her parents, who she is estranged from because of Ernt. Cora’s mother offers her money which she accepts. She keeps this money secret as a nest egg for their move to Alaska.

A Home in Alaska

Before the school year is over, Ernt has bought a Volkswagen and the family heads off on the drive to Alaska. The family is impressed by the beauty of the country, but when they get to Kaneq, they realize how isolated the whole island is, especially their property! 

The family has to learn how to live in Alaska, where summers are spent preparing for the cold, long, hard winters. The house is in a state of neglect and disrepair and they are sorely unprepared for Alaska. Their neighbours help them build the necessary equipment and store food. Everyone chips in and Cora actually starts to make friends, something that was not true in Seattle. Some of the neighbours that they meet belong to a group of survivalists, who are relatives of the Bo who left Ernt his property.

Leni makes a friend at school. Her class is mixed-age with one other child her age. She immediately hits it off with Matthew and they deepen their friendship over time.

Dysfunction and Pain

As the story evolves, we find out the degree of disfunction in the nature of the love between her parents, a love that her mother compares to heroin. Leni begins to notice more character flaws in her father, and in her mother and begins to learn about her fathers violent nature. We see Leni mature and learn more about the relationship between men and women, and struggle to understand the relationship between her parents. She tries to understand, with little guidance, what love and marriage are and tries to determine what parts of her family are normal and acceptable.

None of the main characters in this story is spared the grief that accompanies loss. After years of physical abuse, Cora finally manages to escape from Ernt, but she pays a price for this. The domino effect of consequences cause Leni and Cora to leave Alaska and return to live with her parents. It gives Leni a chance to know her grandparents and Cora an opportunity to reconcile with them. However, Leni also loses her first love during that process and it takes a long time before they can make their way back to each other.

Romeo and Juliet?

I thought this was like a Romeo and Juliet story, with more complexity, more backstory, more pain, but then realized that the hatred was all one sided, and more precisely, in the heart of one man and some of his survivalist friends. I found this book funny in parts, and was brought to tears at other moments. It made me want to visit Alaska, but not in the winter! With a book like this, I always wonder about the author’s motive in having the character suffer so much. It does lead to self-discovery and many enduring life lessons for Leni, and other characters, but there is so much trauma for one person to withstand. However, unlike in A Little Life, this book has a happy ending, with Leni finding the chance to come home, to the place where she belongs.

“Here, where survival is a choice that must be made over and over, in the wildest place in America, on the edge of civilization, where water in all its forms can kill you, you learn who you are. Not who you dream of being, who you imagined you wee, not who you were raised to be. All of that will be torn away in the months of icy darkness, when frost on the windows blurs your view and the world gets very small and you stumble into the truth of your existence. You learn what you will do to survive.

In the vast expanse of this unpredictable wilderness, you will either become your best self and flourish, or you will run away, screaming, from the dark and the cold and the hardship. There is no middle ground, no safe place; not here, in The Great Alone.”

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