Jones, Stan. White Sky, Black Ice. New York: Soho Press, 1999.
Reason read: Alaska’s Seward Day takes place in March.
The first book in Stan Jones’s Nathan Active series has the task of painting a picture of who Nathan Active is. The character development is slow in regards to Active’s personality. Jones spends a lot of time building the backstory of Active’s adoption after his fifteen year old Inupiat mother gave him up. He was raised by a white couple in Anchorage and grew up to be a state trooper. Here’s the rub: he has been posted back in his little birth village of Chukchi where he feels torn between the cultures of his upbringing and the traditions in his blood. He’s an obvious outsider, being raised in the big city. But when atypical suicides start happening one right after the other Active decides to listen to his ancestral roots and dig in.
Confessional: because White Sky, Black Ice takes an environmental spin I kept thinking of Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver. She also tackles the theory that our planet is going to hell.
Author fact: Stan Jones launched the Kotzubue newspaper. He was also an editor for a couple of other newspapers.
Book trivia: White Sky, Black Ice is the first in the Nathan Active series.
Nancy said: Pear said nothing specific except to say White Sky, Black Ice is the first in a series.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the interesting chapter “All Set For Alaska” (p 14).
~*LunaSea*~ 