The Great Alone: Kristin Hannah: A Story of Love, Heartbreak and Survival, From the Bestselling Author of The Nightingale

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Firefly Lane, her beloved novel about two best friends, was the #1 Netflix series around the world, in the week it came out. The popular tv show stars Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke and Season Two is currently set to conclude the series on April 27, 2023. Leni is now 17. She is a good hunter now. Her father has abided by the rules, and each winter after Thanksgiving he leaves to work on the pipeline. Times has changed and Kaneq is now a larger city where tourists occasionally come by. Leni is accepted to college. Marge says Tom, Thelma, and etcetera have agreed to pay the costs so she can go. There's a graduation party at the saloon for her and Matthew but Ernst refuses to let her go. The book starts off with Ernt inheriting a cabin in Alaska. He believes this is the new beginning the family needs. Leni says she’ll go along with the idea that Alaska will provide the “answer” because “that was what love was.” What do you think she meant by that? Cora declines to press charges so Ernst goes home. Months later, Matthew still isn't better. He's moved into a care facility in anchorage. Leni declines to leave for college, since she is waiting for him. Leni finds out she's pregnant. Leni tells Ernt and he starts to hit her. Cora shoots him.

And yet...and yet... Leni is slowly finding her home. In the friendly neighbors, the kind townspeople and the animals surrounding their little homestead. 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. Your mother was a kite string. Without her strong, steady hold on you, you might just float away, be lost somewhere among the clouds.” (126) If you have faced the loss of a loved one, did you find this quote to have special resonance for you? What did the author get right about this sentiment? How else would you describe a mother’s influence? In many ways, The Great Alone, is a mother-daughter love story, but one with a broken spine. How did Cora let Leni down in life, how did she save her? Do you think Cora was a good mother?

1986

This book completely stole my heart. Maybe it's just more fresh in my mind, but I'm pretty sure I enjoyed The Great Alone even more than Kristin Hannah's The Nightingale. In fact, it was verging on a five-star read for me until the final few chapters-- which I felt were too rushed and more sentimental than I personally like. But I still highly recommend it. Fear, Leni learned, was not the small dark closet she’d always imagined; walls pressed in close, a ceiling you bumped your head on, a floor cold to the touch. No. Fear was a mansion, one room after another, connected by endless hallways.” Ernt becomes more volatile as he grows closer to Mad Earle, swapping conspiracy theories and preparing for armageddon.

Kristin Hannah already stole my heart and took all the tears a human body could produce with her masterpiece “Nightingale” (For one year, I suffered from dry eye syndrome! I cried for months and made little children traumatized with my red-rimmed image. Even Step King inspired to write a book named “Red-rimmed” after his “Red-rum sequel”. The story focused on a redhead woman stealing people’s cry and swallow them at night. Yikes! You can imagine he dropped out the project!) But sometimes, especially on days like today, Leni was afraid. It felt to her as if her family stood poised on the edge of a great precipice that could collapse at any second, crumble away like the houses that crashed down Seattle’s unstable, waterlogged hillsides. Maslin, Janet (February 1, 2018). "A Troubled Dad Takes His Family Into the Wild". The New York Times . Retrieved March 13, 2021. The Great Alone” does not disappoint. This was another fascinating, thought-provoking, and captivating read. Heartbreaking at times… but there were also moments of great love and unbelievable kindness. A gripping story where I was desperate to know what was going to happen next. A bittersweet but satisfying ending topped off this amazing read.”They soon head out and get to their new "town" of Kaneq, of less than 30 people. Large Marge (Marge Birdsall) runs the general store and warns them that things will be tough out here, but that they all help each other out. The cabin they've inherited is tiny, with no electricity or running water or even a bathroom (there's an outhouse). He promises he’ll do better, that he’ll cut down on drinking. Leni has seen this all before but she won’t put up a fuss about moving again. She’ll do as she’s asked. It was otherworldly somehow, magical in its vast expanse. An incomparable landscape.” (31) Alaska is definitely a character in this novel. The author clearly wants you to understand both the grandeur and danger that are present every day in the Last Frontier. How did the landscape create and shape this story? Is this a story that could have taken place anywhere? Or was the solitude of Alaska part of the fabric of the novel? Marge shows up, bringing along Natalie Watkins and Geneva Walker, to help make the place live-able. The need a greenhouse and a food storage area (cache) at least. They get to work, and Marge tells them they need to learn how to shoot as well. Leni was spellbound. She still couldn’t believe that an army could march in and take a teenager from her apartment. How could anyone be safe anywhere in a world like that? And how did a rich teenager become a revolutionary named Tania?

Leni meets Mr. Walker's new wife, Atka. They all go to see Matthew. His face is still disfigured and he needs a wheelchair to get around, but at least he is conscious. His speech is imperfect because he needed to re-learn how to speak and read because of the brain damage.Mother and daughter shut their mouth and endured all the false treatments, paranoid behaviors. Cora suffered from beating and verbal abuses but she didn’t defend herself till one day Ernt targeted their own daughter, Leni. That triggers last piece of endurance Cora barely gathered. She needs to protect her daughter by standing against her husband even it means to sacrifice herself and their life changes in one night.

Wait,” Leni said. Even for Dad, this was big. “Alaska? You want to move again? We just moved here.” In 1974, when thirteen-year-old Leni Allbright's volatile, unpredictable father, Ernt, a former POW, loses another job, he makes an impulsive, desperate decision: he will move the family north, to Alaska, where they will live off the land in a spectacular wilderness. Leni was spellbound. She still couldn’t believe that an army could march in and take a teenager from her apartment. How could anyone be safe any- where in a world like that? And how did a rich teenager become a revolutionary named Tania? Now “Firefly Lane” is on my list. It’s also gonna be TV series with Katherine Heigl (I’d better read and skip the show because I don’t want to hate story for wrong casting) Think of it,” Dad said, lifted out of his seat by enthusiasm. “A house that’s ours. That we own. In a place where we can be self-sufficient, grow our vegetables, hunt our meat, and be free. We’ve dreamed of it for years, Cora. Living a simpler life away from all the bullshit down here. We could be free. Think of it.”Kristin Hannah really takes her time laying the foundation for the Allbright family and the tedious work the Alaskan wilderness demands and you know what, that was okay with me. It was around the halfway mark, when she switched gears, that everything came crashing down. After Ernt loses another job, he makes an impulsive decision: he is going to move his family to a small town in Alaska, and settle on some land left to him by a fellow soldier. The thought of moving somewhere so remote, so dangerous, so unknown, is tremendously frightening, but Leni's mother, Cora, has never abandoned her husband no matter what he has done, so she's willing to follow him into the wilderness, in the hopes this may be the fresh start he needs.