“Bighearted stories of domestic discord by a writer with a cleareyed view of Alaska’s romance and hardscrabble realism.” nobody gets out alive
NOBODY GETS OUT ALIVE
both their dads fail them in emotional and material ways. The 73-page “Alcan, an Oral History” follows a single mother and her two children and two women, friends and recent college grads, both groups headed overland to Alaska, and how their lives are forever altered when their paths converge. The fabled frontier is often depicted as a redemptive space, but Newman’s characters can’t outrun their problems. In “Slide and Glide,” a standout, a father takes his family on an epic ski trip to a cabin in the middle of nowhere, hoping to rekindle his marriage only to realize how powerless he is. That’s also true for Genevieve, a rebellious heiress who discovers that early-20th-century Alaska is every bit as socially restrictive as Milwaukee. These stories are rich with wit and wisdom, showing us that love, marriage, and family are always bigger and more perilous adventures than backcountry trips. “Was this marriage,” a newlywed wonders after witnessing his wife lusting after another man, “how well the worst in you worked with the worst in the other person?” Bighearted stories of domestic discord by a writer with a cleareyed view of Alaska’s romance and hardscrabble realism.
Newman, Leigh Scribner (288 pp.) $26.99 | April 12, 2022 978-1-982180-30-0 Eight gritty, harrowing stories of bravery and bluster set in the wilds of Alaska. The women in this absorbing debut collection are larger than life, perhaps because this is what the harsh Alaska landscape demands. Dutch, the narrator of “Howl Palace” (selected for The Best American Short Stories), is selling her house after a string of unsuccessful marriages. Plucky and tough, she installs herself in the mysterious “wolf room” during the open house, and the devastating reasons for her resourcefulness come into sharper focus. In “High Jinks,” Jamie and Katrina, just tweens, have to fend for themselves on a father-daughter float trip after
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kirkus.com
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fiction
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1 february 2022
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